


Terres d'Ombre

by your_local_friendly_ghost



Category: The Evil Within (Video Game)
Genre: + DEFINITIVELY not an hallucination, + Mystery Woman Ou La La Who Could It Be Eyes Emoji, Canon-Typical Violence, DIDN'T made this fic purely out of spite but motherfucker i could have!, Definitively Not 13 Chapters Of Moron Talking To Themselves, Definitively Not 13 Chapters Of Morons Being Awkward, Family Bonding, Guilt, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Violence, Kissing, M/M, Mutual Pining, Panic Attacks, Pining, Possibly Inaccurate Depictions Of Hospital Care, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-TEW2, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reunions, Roommates, Sharing a Bed, Slow Build, bethesda wouldn't release joseph from their basement so i had to go get him, i love this family and i don't know why i hurt them this way, me cocking my PTSD-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder gun : Not So Fast, oh my god they were roommates, tew2 : ends up on a pure uplifting note, you know how it is!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 13:02:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16661587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/your_local_friendly_ghost/pseuds/your_local_friendly_ghost
Summary: (alternate title : A Ribcage Full Of Rosebuds)Lily nestled in his arms, Sebastian escaped hell and never looked back. He built a house out of drawings on walls, pancakes mornings on Saturdays and cat’s fur on his jeans, and now he just waits.When Kidman tells him about Joseph’s disappearance from the shelter she had found for him, Sebastian’s world seems to crumble down, as if another fire had been set to his cards kingdom… but may he fear not, for the rains of Krimson City bring back more than memories.When faced with guilt and a little something more, there is nothing for Sebastian to run from than his own haunted chest.





	1. Perfume

**Author's Note:**

> hi everyone welcome back  
> john johanas owe me multiple thousands of dollars in cash of reparations for emotional damage  
> anyway he was too much of a coward to give me this man in canon so  
> i make the canon now
> 
> enjoy fellas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we learn.

       The nightmares are still here, of course they are.  
They live in the new house like uninvited guests, they like to move the curtains to make Lily think there are ghosts, they sleep in the sink and stare at Sebastian when it’s one in the morning, and he just woke up from a nightmare, and he tries to spit the taste of blood that lingers in his mouth — but nothing spills past his lips.  
They don’t pay rent but wave knives in Sebastian’s mind when he’s just cutting up carrots to go with the chicken nuggets in the microwave, they crawl out of Lily’s closet when she turns her back to it.  
They’re importunating, obnoxious visitors that come into the living room with dirty shoes — but Sebastian and Lily manage.

 

       Lily goes to school again. She’s a brilliant kid, sensitive and creative, if a bit reserved. Her art impresses her teacher — her understanding of color theory and composition, if subconscious, are anchored into her psyche and allow her to make truly stunning pieces for a ten-year-old.  
Sometimes, she draws a downturned smile on her face in self-portrait and fire all around her. Her teacher feels a bit sad.  
Sometimes, she draws a man in a suit dismembering women with a curved knife. Her teacher calls her dad.  
She sees a counselor.  
There are things that come back, night after night, nightmare after nightmare. There is this mute acknowledgment between her and her dad — something happened that we cannot speak of.  
Sebastian wonders if she’s fully aware of what she had gone through for all these years. She smiles like she doesn’t know.

 

       Sebastian works from home. He doesn’t earn that much, but he can provide for Lily.  
Between these walls, he is safe.  
He makes Lily breakfast like he used to on mornings, pancakes on Sundays, drives her to school in this red car that makes a little bit too much noise for his taste now.  
When she waves goodbye to him as she walks into the building, Sebastian feels his throat tighten and his chest grow dark with a bile of terror.  
_What if it’s the last time I see her ? What if it’s the last time I see her ?_  
He’s shaking when he drives back home and needs fifteen minutes to calm down, but every afternoon Lily waves “hi” when she exits the building, and Sebastian smiles.  
He helps Lily with her Spanish homework. The words are so natural in his throat and on his tongue, and his smile radiates with pride when she succeeds to roll her R’s. He sings to her in that language and her big blue eyes look at him in awe.  
Lily doesn’t want to wear her pink dresses anymore. Sebastian lets her put boys’ shirts and shorts in the shopping cart. He calls her handsome when she walks out of the fitting room.  
Her new nickname, “Tiger Lily”, makes her smile brighter than anyone thought she could.

 

       This house is smaller than their old home but bigger than the one he shared with Myra when Lily was gone.  
Lily decorated her own room, chose some cushions for the sofa in the living room. There are plants on the deck and the large sliding doors let in all of the warm afternoon sun. The cat is an asshole, but he curls up against Sebastian’s side at night.  
Sebastian sits on the couch and lets himself think.  
The pictures and Lily’s drawings on the wall look covered in honey in the golden evening light. The cat aggressively gnaws on a piece of chicken Sebastian left him. Lily is doing her math homework and humming one of Sebastian’s songs.  
Sebastian smiles. His heart gleams with warmth.  
“ _This is the life I’ve been striving for._ ”  
He turns to the woman who shares his life, excited to catch the same glee in the shimmering pupil of her blue eyes and the sun running playfully in her blonde locks.  
The couch is empty beside him.  
_Shared_.

 

       Sometimes Sebastian thinks of Myra.  
When he washes his face, before dawn even breaks, to chase the nightmares with cold water, expecting her to walk into the bathroom in her satin robe.  
When he changes into his sleepwear, almost sure he heard her rustle in the sheets.  
When he cooks, persuaded she’s standing behind him, waiting to taste his dish.  
But she never comes.

 

       He thinks of Myra.  
Of how there is no grave to come to. No tombstone to lay on to cry. No hill of grass to bring flowers to.  
_At least it saves the funeral money, eh ?_  
It’s not even funny.

He thinks of Myra.  
Wonders where she is, how she feels (does she even feel now ?), not knowing a thing but two :  
one, she sacrificed herself for him and Lily to live long and happy lives ;  
two, she won’t ever come back.

Some days, he has made peace with these thoughts.  
Some days, he hasn’t.

 

       Lily laughs happier with each passing day and cries harder with each passing night.  
Pancakes on Sundays smell like stability and Sebastian’s old car like happy days from another timeline.  
Juli texts him often and even convinced him to get Skype. When Sebastian asks her what she’s doing with her life these days, she smiles and says, “I’m figuring it out”.

 

“ _Joseph isn’t dead._ ”

 

       Between the welcoming walls of their new home, in the midst of the smells of batter and flowers, Sebastian lives in wait.  
Joseph will come back.  
_Joseph will come home._

 

 


	2. It only rains in Krimson City

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sebastian gets a phone call.

       Two feet beat the asphalt of the sideway, heavy and rough. The legs bend and shake with each step, the knees twitching in with a worrying weakness. The body sways and rocks like a doll of fabric blown in the wind. The rain cascades onto the hair, under the shirt, sliding like a cold, icy snake down the spine, over the shoulders, the long coat that surely was beige once turning brown and grey as the skies spit on it.

Worried eyes follow the path with curious stares, mouths curling in words of apprehension, concerned glances shared between strangers — a web of uneasiness weaving between wanderers of this grey day as they are drawn, unconsciously, to the silhouette that disappears in the drizzle.  
The body jolts upward as if the mind inside of it had just woken up, and troubled gazes tear away from its silhouette. The rain falls and washes away trouble as the strangers untangle themselves from the web, and walk away from the body that sways and rocks like a doll of fabric in the wind.

       Two feet beat the asphalt of the sideway, heavy and rough, and suddenly the toes hit an uneven patch, and the knee bends, giving up under the weight as if it had been carrying it for far too long. The body falls and unceremoniously hits the ground in a muffled sound, the coat waving after its dip like a cape. The sound of glasses creaking as the head hits the sidewalk is heard in the midst of the dulled life of a city with a grey heart smelling like fuel. The rain keeps falling.

A young woman under a red umbrella stopped in her tracks and walks to the collapsed stranger, holding her purse against her breast, her eyebrows raised high in worry.

“Are you okay ?” she asks, voice unconvincing, and she trots to the body laying immobile on the sidewalk.

Another woman, her grey hair damp from her mistake of forgetting her rain hood, joins the previous one on in her concern.  
And another one, and another one, and soon the cortege of the web seems to be reunited in a circle around the collapsed coat-wearer.  
Whispers and murmurs run from mouth to mouth as strangers swarm around the fainted one like maggots.  
Soon genuine worry spills from lips, the woman with the red umbrella crouching next to the body and she asks “are you okay ? can you talk ?” as water spills from the roofs.  
“Check the breathing!”, a voice commands from between the gathered souls, the writhing worms, “check the breathing!” and the crouched woman does. Her hand runs in front of the nose, the mouth, finds a low, warm exhale against her palm. She lets herself smile as she shouts back: “Breathing is fine!”  
Maggots turn to protectors as is asked “Do they have a belt or a tie? You’re supposed to loosen them up to help them!” and “How long have they been unconscious?”, and in the confusion and chaos and general doubt, finally, a voice rings: “can someone call an ambulance?”.  
The woman asks someone to hold her umbrella as she looks for a pulse in the folds of the stranger’s shirt.  
Her fingers wiggle and curls against the fabric before reaching skin. She searches for the heartbeat against the icy skin of the neck. She finds a feather-light, muffled and slow drumming against the flesh, and is unable to count the palpitations.

“They’re alive !” she shouts at the crowd around her, who lets out a collective sigh of relief.  
“The ambulance is coming !” a man informs over the rain, earning another sigh.

The woman carefully takes hold of the stranger’s head as it lays against the asphalt, turning it slowly to take a look at their face.  
They look like someone… Someone she’s sure she knows.  
From where ?  
This face makes memories resurface, but yet, she cannot fully remember.

The ambulance is coming, its powerful siren tearing the canvas of the calm and collected scene around the fainted stranger. Blue and red lights shine through the drizzle, getting caught in the corners of eyes, painting the buildings ocean and blood.  
The woman with the red umbrella shifts on her heels to stand up.  
As her hands leave the pulse point, they brush over something — it’s laced with a thin black thread and oddly red against the pale skin. A large, warm hand gently pulls her away from the body, and a paramedic nods at her when she looks back.  
The crowd is gradually dispersed as the EMT bring the stretcher out of the van.  
The fainted stranger is carefully but quickly set in the gurney with the work of the medical team and soon the van’s doors close on their unconscious body.  
The woman with the red umbrella is left wondering, her memories still stinging in a locked chest, about the stranger’s face.  
When the lights are gone, driven away with the sound of a powerful horn, the crowd shiftly scatters. The rain falls still, the dry spot left by the body is soon damp once more. The web is loose, and none of these people will ever meet each other again. The ghost of the fainted stranger will haunt them for a few days, and soon it’ll be gone, like water down the drain.

 

       Sebastian is carefully cutting up pieces of chicken for enchiladas when his phone rings.  
Hands sticky with chicken fat, he curses as he storms the kitchen to find tissues.  
He picks up what is announced as Juli’s call with a low rumble.

“This is not the best time to call me, Kidman, I was—”  
“I can’t find him,” Juli’s ghostly voice answers.

Sebastian’s face grows cold at her tone.  
He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it one bit.  
She didn’t even say anything, really, but her voice carries this chilling, horrifying inflection. Her voice fell flat and dry, translucent, in Sebastian’s ear, and he feels like he has heard it a thousand times before.

“What do you mean,” he manages to ask, the roughness of his voice hanging onto nothing but a thread of wanting to sound composed.  
“I can’t find him. Joseph. I can’t find him. He’s gone.”  
“Gone ?” Sebastian asks, a pent-up anger threatening to boil in his throat. “You mean you knew where he was ?”  
“Yeah,” he hears Juli answers, her voice sounding still so flat and unresponsive to the rage tainting his tone involuntarily.  
“And you didn’t tell me where he was so I could go find him ?!” Sebastian barks, his voice croaking with something deeply hurt that he feels the need to choke out by clutching at his chest.  
“I had a plan,” Juli begins, her voice suddenly alive, “we had a plan for him to stay under the radar in this hideout in which I managed to have him stay in— I had obtained from The Administrator to have him get out of the main building — the command center, where the STEM is — and convinced him Joseph would help us from afar…”  
“You had him stay in a hideout ?” Sebastian asks, his voice oozing with hardly-contained anticipation and exasperation.  
“Yeah, but listen, listen,” Juli urges him — Sebastian can hear her roaming as she bumps into walls and furniture, crumpling sheets and papers — “I would contact him often, right ? But a little while ago he told me I should stop contacting him, because he had plans to get out on his own and whatnot— so I did, I stopped contacting him, while still checking up on him—”

Sebastian holds the phone to his chest as he exhales deeply. His legs bend at his knees, twitching with a fear that he refuses to register as such to keep his heart from spilling from his mouth, and he walks to the sofa to find support. He flops less-than-gracefully onto the cushions as his legs give up under his weight and puts the phone back against his ear.

“— and I wanted to ask him to meet you today but then— when I went to the hideout, he wasn’t there anymore !”

Sebastian rubs his eyes as his whole body sinks into the couch with a growing weariness.

“I checked the place to see if he had left any message or clue, but nothing ! I walked around a bit, but I couldn’t see him anywhere.”

Sebastian lets out a deep, deep sigh.

“Okay. Okay. So what now.” he asks, voice blank with exhaustion, even if a spark of pain threatens to seep between the words.  
“I don’t know,” Juli answers after a defeated sigh. “He can’t be far, because he has no car… I think I’ll keep looking for him.”  
“Yeah,” Sebastian replies, monotone and drained, as his former colleague’s words seemed to have pulled every last string of hope that stitched him together out of his chest, leaving him painfully spilling everywhere.  
“I’ll keep you updated,” Juli continues, her voice carrying an upbeat tone of determination.

Before Sebastian can slip in another jaded “okay”, she hangs up.  
Sebastian is left alone in a house that suddenly feels emptier, mimicking his chest it seems, colder and harsh. He leans forward and buries his head in his hand. His phone slips and hits the ground. He can’t be bothered.

 

 


	3. When you last left me, my blood was in a jar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a hospital isn't an omen of death.

       When Sebastian brings Lily home, the chicken isn’t done cooking.  
Juli’s call interrupted his cooking and the entire process got delayed — not only by her, but by the many, many minutes he needed to pull himself back together.  
He paced around, pulling his hair, biting his knuckles ; his blood boiled with something scary, pain and anger and guilt like poison running in his veins, singing their song of despair to his ears, and it took a lot of control for Sebastian not to run to the nearest store, buy five bottles of whiskey and drown in the liquor to never have to wake up in this reality where Joseph was, once again, gone.

 

       Lily was smiling and singing when she hopped in Sebastian’s car and rolled down the window to feel the warm breeze on her arms as they drove off. She was bubbling with excitation, her hands moving uncontrollably like two pink butterflies drunk on nectar, as she told her dad about her days.  
Her voice was music to Sebastian’s ears, who almost managed to relax as he listened to her.  
Lily noticed the way her dad’s smile couldn’t sink into his cheek, how his lips were pursed in this anxious grimace, the way his eyes were wide with anguish. Her smile wilted in a second.

“Daddy,” she asked uneasily, “is everything okay…?”

Sebastian’s eyes darted to her face.

“Oh, of course sweetheart,” he lied through his teeth. “Don’t worry, I’m just thinking about some things.”

Lily read his lie in his eyes and sat back, silent, in her seat, and didn’t speak anymore.  
Sebastian’s chest almost busted open with guilt, but something in his throat was choking him down. Words wouldn’t leave the back of his throat, even when he tried to force himself to ask Lily to keep talking.  
He needed her voice. He needed her voice.

 

       Sebastian is carefully browning the chicken bits in a pan, eyes focused on the cooking. Lily is already at the table, her copybook and pencil case laid out in a terribly messy way, humming in the hopes of cheering herself up.  
Guilt is gnawing at Sebastian’s insides, and he tries to keep it at bay by concentrating aggressively on the chicken.  
“ _It needs all of my love and attention to be tasty,_ ” he forces himself to think, “ _it needs all of my love and attention to be tasty._ ”  
His fingers hurt with the strength he had been holding the pan handle with, but he feels like his current sanity depends on how hard he has his grip on that thing — as he can’t seem to have a grip on himself.  
The sun is going down and Sebastian tries to make himself enjoy the way peach and gold paint his house as the last rays of light spilling like paint in his living room, but he can’t, he can’t ,and his whole body seems to be subtly shaking with how much he feels — anger, and pain, and rage, and guilt, and the sinking feeling poisoning his chest that he will never see Joseph again. He’s not ready to grieve.  
Not ready to grieve _again._

His phone rings and he jerks out of his thoughts, almost as if he was brutally pulled out a dream. Hands full of vegetables, he calls to Lily in the next room :

“Lily, oh merciless striped beast, could you pick up please ?”  
“Okay !” her high-pitched voice replies.

Lily carefully lays her pen back in the crease of her copybook and slips off her chair. She lets the phone let out its third ring and picks the cellphone up in her small, ink-stained hands.

“Hello?” she pipes into the handset.  
“Hello, um… Mr. Castellanos…?” a surprised voice answers.  
“That’s my daddy!” Lily peeps back.  
“Oh! Well then sweetheart, could you get your father on the phone?”

Lily trots to the kitchen, tapping Sebastian’s hip before handing him the phone. He thanks her with a smile he hopes doesn’t look too forced and a pat on her dark hair, and nestles the phone between his shoulder and cheek.

“Castellanos speaking.”

“Mr. Castellanos? This is Krimson City Northern Hospital.”

His mouth runs dry. His breath cuts short. Something heavy and dark, powerful like a spear sinks into his lungs and his guts knot in something rotten.  
His eyelids, closed as if he accused a blow, flash a blinding white ringing with static.  
With a vigorous shake of his head, Sebastian manages to fetch his voice back from the deep dark corners of his mind it has started to wander to.

“I’m listening.”

He can hear the reverberation of the tremble in his voice, the weight of his uneven exhale in the phone. His fingers curl over the knife in his hand.  
On the other end of the phone, a clear, crystalline voice with the assurance of a knight starts echoing.

 

       The phone finds its place back on its designated table. A large, unsteady hand runs through his dark locks.  
A worried glance slips in Lily’s direction, finding her questioning eyes. The weight of the caller’s words and the fear of leaving her spill and spur and slowly consume his insides before a long inhale chase them both and Sebastian finds resolution in the rational thoughts he forces himself to articulate.

“Lily, baby, can I leave you alone for a little while? If anything happens, you can call me or Kidman. You also know where to hide and how to react in any case. We reviewed it together, right?”

Lily offers a nod and a wide smile, visibly delighted that her father trusts her enough to leave her by herself.

“Where are you going, dad?” she asks.

Sebastian slips a jean jacket over his plain t-shirt.

“Krimson City Northern Hospital.”

 

       The building is far from what Sebastian feared. Light and grey, luminous like a cloudy day under a white sun, barely obstructed by any furniture. Squares, rectangles, edges sanded to non-threateningness await his unsure gaze as he walks past the automatic doors.  
With a gesture of her hand, a woman attracts him to the biggest counter he can see. Multiple flyers are precisely arranged into piles and labelled holders onto its grey wood.  
As Sebastian states his name, the woman fills the description of the business he has to be here for. Pointing him to an elevator, she articulates a floor and room number. Sebastian thanks her. She almost sends him away with a dismissing hand gesture.

       The elevator is empty. It is large enough for two draft horses to fit in, all buttons on its wall round and big, numbers and important places subtitled in braille, the two walls not opening into a door are supporting mirrors.  
Sebastian catches his reflection.  
His stature seems to lean to the left, pulled out of balance by his heavy heart, the slope of his dropping shoulders is a path to the deep dark soil that his thoughts walk as he shakes them out of his head.  
His gaze finds his reflection, then runs away.  
He dares glances at the face he doesn’t recognize, pale and ghostly under the bright light of the small cabin. He sees how his eyes sink into his sockets, skull-like stare from his reflection making his hand curl into a fist as his breath hitches in his throat, how the dark circles under his eyes cradle irises sparkling with hopeful lights that die faster than a heartbeat, blown by his own thoughts like the light of a candle.  
Hope casts light on his face and fear makes it wilt.  
His hands shake with excitation and this blood that makes his skin ice — this black spit of nightmares that still run the steps of his spine when he turns his back on a shadow.  
He asks himself, just once, barely loud enough to even hear it within his own head: “ _who is that, staring back?_ ”

He barely knows if he recognizes himself.  
His heart skips a beat as the thought of who he’s going to visit not remembering his face.  
The elevator’s doors open in a swift, muffled sound.

       He stands in front of the door, or rather it stands in front of him. The polished, varnished wood is almost beige, slightly warmer than grey, perfectly even in the thin white frame. The number on the door, a metallic grey ever so slightly far from matte, shines peacefully for Sebastian’s eyes. The knob on the door seems designed for his hand. His palm finds a hold around it.  
Forcing a deep breath in, that meets his lungs uneven and shaky, he dares a step forward. Then one, then two. The door doesn’t make a sound.  
His eyes seek familiarity as they observe the walls, the window, half-open under thick turquoise curtains, the TV on the wall. They find the bed feet, then the mattress, they follow the sheet cautiously laid over, over— _oh…_

Those are the same hands, the barely noticeable veins running over the knuckles,  
Those are the same eyes, if closed peacefully, heavy-lashed, offering in the quiescence of sleep the hint of a lid, cradled in a dark hue.  
This is the same hair, still so dark, still so thick, messy in wild locks that fall in front of the eyes.  
This is the same nose, ever so slightly flat, crooked in a barely noticeable way at the top of the bridge.  
Those are the same cheeks, if ran hollow, if turned a bit grey.  
Those are the same arms — _oh, did they grow thinner?_ In the crook of the elbows run bruises holding the colors of supernovae.  
This is the same man, the same man Sebastian feels he has for a thousand years, yet never, left.  
This is Joseph.  
_Joseph, Joseph, Joseph..._  
The name burns his tongue, his breath whistles in pain and relief.  
He murmurs it, just once.  
And again.  
And again.

 

       Sebastian stumbles forward, his hand pushes the door back and it slams into its frame — Sebastian doesn’t even jump. His legs bend and almost give out under the weight he carries, his heart, as it sinks into his guts, turning to plumb.  
His breath and his pulse stutter and collapse and rise in ruins, and he finally lets himself fall into the chair at Joseph’s bedside.

Sebastian cannot breathe. Sebastian cannot speak. He seeks on Joseph’s face every traits that had started to fade from his memories and he is alive in Sebastian’s thoughts again.

Bleeding, coughing, smiling, desperate, thorough — alive.  
_Alive, alive, alive._  
Joseph’s skin has grown pale, his chapped lips parted in what Sebastian prays is sleep, his lashes fallen like heavy curtains over his eyes. His hands, that Sebastian even feel weird looking at like this, ungloved, uncovered, bare in an almost obscene way, have their fingers slightly curled as they rest on the sheet, relaxed, unbothered. An IV mounts his right hand.

Joseph’s name tastes tart on Sebastian’s tongue like one of these wines he would drink on big occasions, whose tastes eventually got sanded by the cheap liquors he tried to kill his sorrows (and liver) with.

Guilt tastes sour, relief tastes clear, the scent of asphalt and guts linger in the back of his mind from a time that still flashes behind his closed eyelids at night, and Sebastian leans forward.  
One of his hands find the sheet draped over Joseph’s body, the ruffling of the fabric almost making his choke.  
He lets his gaze drift over Joseph’s arms. Yellow and brown edges frame fading, faded, ghosts of purple and red bruises in the crook of his elbows. Sebastian recognizes the way the colors pepper Joseph’s pale skin: hematomas after getting blood drawn. They seem old from their hues and size, making Sebastian push his worries aside.

“ _Joseph…_ ” he repeats.

A golden light peeks from behind the curtains.  
Sebastian’s hand slide on the sheet. He honors Joseph’s slow, low, even breathing with apnea. His eyes slip and slide and search Joseph’s chest. It rises and it falls under the cover.  
Alive.  
Joseph is alive.  
Sebastian lets this thought run in his mind.  
Joseph has survived getting shot twice (in STEM, okay, so maybe it doesn’t count, but it totally does, because many people didn’t come back from it), Joseph has survived his own chaotic, deleterious mind, he has survived the Haunted, he has survived Ruvik, he has survived the three years of… whatever could have happened to him when Sebastian thought him dead (and to even try to imagine what went on between MOBIUS’ walls has Sebastian’s heart jumping in his throat), he has survived hiding from them.  
He has learned to survive.

Sebastian’s hand leaves the sheet.  
It hovers, unsure, uncertain, as if terrified to meet nothing but dust, over Joseph’s.  
It dives.  
Sebastian’s palm settles, mild and slow in the fear to break the bones, over the back of Joseph’s hands. The knuckles slightly jut out, ran by thin blue veins, the fingers ever so slightly twitch at the touch.  
Sebastian’s hand finds the skin, not warm by any mean, but not quite cold. The bones and the ligaments fill the cup of his palm and his fingers find, running the hill of the dorsum, a heartbeat.  
Slow, low, quiet in its fatigue.  
A heartbeat nonetheless.  
Sebastian’s head drops forward and his forehead presses against the mattress.  
His mouth articulates a breathless, soundless thank before falling agape  
His long, loud exhale is torn apart by a choked sound of painful relief. His hold over Joseph’s hand tightens. He doesn’t dare to dream of Joseph’s fingers curling into his grasp but thinks he feels them still.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you guys are still here?  
> also if you're wondering, this chapter title is a piece of a song, and so is the majority of my chapter titles for this fic  
>  ~~pweas e ask me about the songs~~


	4. Home Within Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a Polish (?) doctor (?) tell Sebastian a lot of things.

       What Sebastian guesses is any kind of doctor waltzes in, undisturbed, unbothered, indiscreet — Sebastian lets his hand fall off Joseph’s, uncovering the pale flesh.

“Ah,” the doctor starts, pointing a pen in his direction, “Castellanos, yes?” His accent is thick, slavic, warm over his small mouth sunken into his wide face.

Sebastian offers a nod. The man pushes his long coat away from his hip and runs a finger between the inked pages of a report.

“How did you find my number?” Sebastian asks, “How did you know to call me?”

Pointing the bedside table with his pen, the doctor replies : “A small notebook in his vest. Your numbers were scribbled on the first page with your name in big letters. A picture of you, too.”  
Sebastian’s eyes divert to Joseph’s face.  
His face, he imagines, his face on iced paper, nestled within the yellow pages of Joseph’s notebook.  
His face that Joseph carried with him through these three whole years.  
_Three whole years…_  
Guilt pulls a choked little sound out of his throat. He quickly regains composure as the doctor’s voice buzzes to his ears:

“You two… Family?”

Sebastian looks at Joseph’s pale face, then at the hand he has laid next to his and retracts into a fist.

“We’re partners,” he begins, and promptly adds, under the doctor barely inquisitive gaze, as if to justify himself: “like colleagues. We have been working together for over ten years.”

_The correct sentence is “you had been working together”, Sebastian. And it would have been a small nine years of partnership when you left him to his fate._

As he aggressively shakes his head to dislodge the thoughts creeping into his throat and down his esophagus, he catches the doctor’s eyes on him. Lit up by these lights of unspoken knowledge and insight, barely dark enough to be read.  
A warm wind waltzes in and out of the room.  
The doctor taps the side of his own skull with a heavy index finger.

“Personal demons, yes?”

Sebastian doesn’t answer.

“Is he… gonna be okay?” Sebastian finally pulls himself to ask. His voice bends and stumbles in his throat. The doctor feigns to not have noticed.  
“Oh yes!” He enthusiastically barks, punching out of Sebastian’s chest a sigh of relief that he tries to contain. “Do not worry, he is not in a coma, or something like that. We found no brain injury, no internal bleeding. All organs are in place!”

Sebastian lets out a breathy laugh at the ardor in his voice.

“He suffered a syncope. Probably low blood sugar and blood pressure, among others.”

The doctor walks to Joseph’s bed. His voice grows lower.

“We also think his body suffered a big amount of stress and exhaustion could have had an incidence on his loss of consciousness. We can only guess he also suffered a lot of mental stress, but we weren’t able to perform a psychological evaluation due to his state!”

The way the doctor’s voice jumped, jolly and joking, at the last part of his sentence, had Sebastian involuntarily chuckle. Stress and anxiety were little by little being shed of his skin.  
Nothing but Joseph mattered, now.  
Alive Joseph.

 

“When do you think he’s going to wake up?” Sebastian dares to ask. Barely a whisper, barely heard by his only listener.

“Oh, anytime now. When we got him at eleven this morning, he immediately shifted from syncopal unconsciousness to normal sleep — which also made us think he was exhausted. He’ll wake up when he’s done with his nap!” The man finishes with a smile as large as his little mouth allows him.

Sebastian’s voice breaks into a heartfelt laugh.  
The doctor takes two heavy steps in his direction and roughly slaps his shoulder twice in a display of encouragement. Sebastian doesn’t budge as he feels like his shoulder blade has been dislocated.

The fluid drips from its bag into the tube, feeding Joseph’s hand a hint of color, drop by drop.  
His lips are barely parted as the inclination of his pillow makes his mouth fall ever-so-slightly open.

“When can he go home…?”

Sebastian’s voice brings a warm wind through the barely open window.

“Eh! When he wakes up. There’s nothing much we can do. All he needs to do is rest a lot and get some more meat on him. Maybe get another check-up in a few weeks, a blood test.”

Sebastian nods absentently.

“You taking him with you? Your home?” The doctor asks with another point of his pen.  
“It’s what I intended on doing, yes,” Sebastian replies. He checks with a glance on the side the other man’s reaction.  
“Good!” The wide-faced fellow yaps roughly. “I’m sure he’ll be better off sleeping in a good home and eating good food than staying here gargling on hospital meals.”

The prospect of Joseph waking up feels so foreign to the man Sebastian has become.  
He had buried him so long ago.  
The thought of Joseph awake makes his tongue go dry.  
What will he say? What will Joseph say? Is Joseph in any kind of immediate danger? Is he bringing trouble to his house if he drives Joseph to his place?  
Sebastian can think, and think, but in the slowly-setting sun, the thought of Joseph coming home roams in his mind like so many other ghosts — but this one, oh, this one… He would let it haunt him forever.  
Sebastian thinks of the dinner he has left alone. He smiles at the idea of Joseph sitting at the table.  
Joseph will come home.  
_Home._  
_Home._  
_Home._

“I’ll leave you two now,” the doctor finally states. “He’s going to wake up soon. Please ring the nurse before leaving.”  
“Thank you, doc,” Sebastian says.

The visitor offers a toothful grin that makes Sebastian think the man never was a doctor.  
But in this moment, as he dares to slide his hand back on Joseph’s, he doesn’t care. He could be discussing with a god a trickster or an evil genie and he couldn’t care less.

Before disappearing out of the door, the maybe-doctor whispers final words in Sebastian’s direction.

“As for the bruises on his arms and on… well. We cannot do much about it but let them heal but… if is there is something more sinister… this is probably something you should see with the police.”

 _“We are the police,”_ Sebastian almost replies.  
But they are not.  
Not anymore.  
They are survivors of a hell this bright-eyed doctor couldn’t even fathom if he had rented a room in Satan’s castle itself.  
They are wandering shadows that don’t fit their old uniforms anymore.  
They are ashes not cleaned off a desk they used too long, coffee stains on keyboards.  
They’re alive. Just alive.  
And that’s enough.

 

       Sebastian’s hand lingers on Joseph’s. He watches how his dirty marriage ring lights up, kissed by the setting sun. How Joseph’s pale skin tinkles with gold as Sebastian tightens, then loosens his hold.  
With each passing second, Sebastian’s thoughts walk closer to the image of Joseph’s eyes finally blinking open… or never opening again.  
In his chest, hope and fear bare their teeth and crack open their jaws at the other. A silent rage that has Sebastian’s hand gripping Joseph’s harder.  
He is time witnessing the eternal sleep of a prince in some kind of twisted tale. The sun descends, silent witness of a guilt he pretends isn’t eating him from the inside. His free hand slides under Joseph’s, cradling it between his two palms like a wounded bird.  
But Joseph is not a wounded bird.  
Joseph is a trained, competent, sharp and deadly man.  
_What is left of all of this?_  
Sebastian’s chest grows dark like the deepest of seas with the thought of Joseph not recognizing him.  
_What is they wiped his memory? What if they lobotomized him? What if, what if, what if_ _—_

The sticky, dry sound of an eye cracking open.  
A lash that sticks to the lid.  
Sebastian’s breath stills, suspended in the evening air. He dares a glance.  
Joseph’s eyes, on him. Deep, dark, brown. The shine of the setting sun in his tired irises.  
Sebastian’s voice falling mute on his lips.  
Joseph’s name that he tries to call.  
Joseph who calls his name.

“Sebastian...”

Once.

“Sebastian…?”

Twice. Unsure, shaky, breathy. Standing in front of a dream he can’t explain.

“Sebastian.”

Three times.  
Resolution, pain, relief, _oh, so much relief_ in his trembling voice. A name he wants to scream but is too weak to.  
Sebastian throws his head onto the blanket and pulls Joseph’s hand to his chest. The choked, breathless noise he makes finishes waking Joseph up.  
Joseph repeats his name one more time. His voice has risen from his chest and bursts from his lips.

 

       As they hear the nurse’s footsteps, Sebastian helps Joseph put on the glove he can slip on. His arms struggle to bend with the bruises in the hollow of his elbows, his fingers are weak as they curl into the familiar leather.  
A sigh of relief, let out from the depths of Joseph’s chest, reaches Sebastian’s ears.

       As Joseph signs the discharge papers, a nurse trots to the counter with a brown, slightly damp coat in her arms. She gently taps Joseph’s shoulder to get his attention.

“Sir, your coat.”

Joseph’s eyes land on the fabric, spark with a sudden light that dies in a sweep. He points at Sebastian and says, struggling to articulate:

“His.”

The nurse promptly turns to him and Sebastian, fingers shaking, takes hold of the heavy curtain of beige fabric.

“Thank you,” he whispers, and as the nurse walks away, he turns to Joseph.

Joseph had found his coat. Joseph had kept his coat.  
Sebastian wants to ask him about it, question him over it, but Joseph does naught but rise his eyes to Sebastian.  
His face seems heavy and struggling to emote with fatigue, but he manages, brown eyes cradled in the purple hue of restlessness, a smile.  
_A smile, a smile, a smile._  
Tired, weary, struggling. The smile of a man risen from the grave.

 

       Lily’s eyes grow big, and bigger, as she sees Joseph exit her father’s car. Helped by Sebastian onto whom he leans, Joseph limps into the driveway. Sebastian barely dares to breathe, as if it would distract him. He has offered an arm for Joseph to rest against.  
Lily calls Joseph’s name.  
Her voice rings like the song of a spring bird into the house.

Sebastian closes the door behind them after having helped Joseph lean against the sofa.  
Lily is running in circles around him, excitedly agitating her arms like a magpie, singing his name. Joseph lets out a very small laugh.

Sebastian’s chest bursts with warmth and a smile digs into his cheeks until it is painful as he finds finally the moment to say:

“Welcome home.”

 

 


	5. Moth-Eaten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is no light for the moths to find.

       Sebastian serves dinner and Lily sings Joseph’s name with her mouth full of food, her hamster face glowing in joy. Sebastian slips some of his food to Joseph, his eyes gleaming unbelieving, relieved lights.  
Joseph is at the table, the missing apostle, his arms crossed over his chest.  
Sebastian’s mouth spills unheard words as his thoughts run, run, run, feral horses finally brought back to their wild roaming lands, the guilt drowning and soaking, brought to the depths by the final alleviation of years of dwelling over a corpse that could never be found. Sebastian stutters and chuckles awkwardly as this overwhelming weight finally slips off his shoulders and buries itself in the ground, where he once thought Joseph rested.  
Unable to find words, Sebastian finally lets silence drape over them.  
Lily’s joyful blabbering still distracts his ears, but his eyes don’t leave Joseph.  
There still lingers, deep between his lungs, the paralyzing fear that, were he to look away for a single moment, Joseph would be gone.

 

       As Lily gobbles down her dessert, Sebastian observes the way Joseph stays.  
Arms crossed over his chest, unable to extend fully, his eyes seem fogged by thoughts that loiter between his ears.  
_What kind of thoughts? What kind of fears?_  
He faintly jumps when Sebastian reaches a hand in his direction. Sheepish and pale, Joseph looks at him as if he couldn’t find him. Eyes, unfocused, looking for him in a void — is this what he had been doing these past three years?  
_He is lost. Lost again._  
Sebastian’s lips burn with three years of apologies, of unspoken words that he thought of once spilling over a grave but never got to. His mouth goes dry and all he can manage is Joseph’s name, hushed, trembling.  
Joseph blinks, absent. Sebastian notices a thin red scar on the side of his neck when he looks around.

 

       Joseph stays at the table as Sebastian busies himself cleaning up the dishes. He looks around as if he just woke up, sits uncomfortably as he if was an uninvited guest. Lily trots to the table with a copybook and a metal box full of color pencils.

“Hey,” Sebastian gently hails Joseph with a hand on his shoulder that makes him imperceptibly jump. “Do you want to take a shower? That would help you relax. You deserve one.”

Joseph vaguely turns his head to look at him. His mouth is slightly open in a numbed, uncomprehending face. Sebastian sees him blink heavily, lightly shaking his head as if to emerge from the mental fog he’s crawling through, and finally let out a wobbly nod.  
Sebastian helps him out of his chair as he limps from fatigue and guides him to the bathroom.

“... New bathroom.” Joseph’s voice blankly states. His voices are hushed, muffed with the tightness of his throat and the exhaustion that still weights his blood down.

“Yeah,” Sebastian agrees. “New house as well,” he chuckles.

Joseph nods in an absent acknowledgment.

“I’ll, hum. I’ll get you some clothes. They may be too big for you, but I’ll see what I can get.” And with that, Sebastian is out of the bathroom. Joseph’s eyes follow him as he disappears down the hallway. Pupils grow wide as something creeps in between the white walls and out of the drain, rabid as it reaches for Joseph’s throat — fear or fear of fear or something worse, it makes the bruises hurt as if they were fresh and two spots on his spine iced as if something cold dripped out of wounds.

Joseph doesn’t dare a look over his shoulder but Sebastian soon walks back in the room with a batch of clean clothes.

“I hope they’ll fit you. Hum. I’m going to go back to the living room and let you have your shower. Call me if you need anything, yeah?” At that, Joseph offers a comprehending, if slightly off, nod. Sebastian offers one in retaliation and walks out of the room.

As he walks to the living room, old thoughts bubble up to behind his eyelids.  
Thoughts that, drowned in anguish and remorse for the past three years, had been locked away.  
Sebastian remembers Joseph helping him into his apartment bathroom, so clean and white, so different from Sebastian’s where empty bottles were piled near the toilet where he would throw liquor up, making him sit on the closed toilet lid as Sebastian wailed and bawled.  
Joseph closing the door behind him as he drenched cotton pads with disinfectant and attended to Sebastian’s wounds — a bruise seeping with blood here, a busted knuckle there, _a cut running down his lip, down his eyebrows, dripping…_  
Sebastian needs to shake his head to force these thoughts out.

He remembers Joseph helping him out of his clothes wet with alcohol, holding his wild lock away from his face as he would bend into the toilet bowl… Sebastian’s lips twitch in a grimace as he reminisces. It must have been as uncomfortable for Joseph to deal with then as it is to think about now… if not more.  
Sebastian remembers how Joseph had to scrub his trembling body out of blood, syrupy liquor and cheap Cologne that had seeped into his skin as Sebastian curled into a ball in the cradle of Joseph’s porcelain white bathtub.

But Joseph’s bathtub is a long-faded memory, fallen into pieces like charcoal in their grip on the past, and his house has been empty for so long that ghosts have probably rented the place.  
There is no more piss-drunk Sebastian having to be picked up from the bar at inhuman hours, his heavy body no more to be pulled into the dimly-lit apartment as he cried out, making the whole building shake — and hopefully there never will again.  
Now, Sebastian is standing tall, and the night has crept in the house purple and gold from the lamps outside, and Joseph is the one whose spine bends under the weight of all the secrets he has to keep, whose skin seeps with something dark that needs to be thoroughly scrubbed raw — and Sebastian will help him.  
Swearing on Joseph’s difficult smile like he would have sworn on his grave, Sebastian makes the promise to take care of him like Joseph has, for so long, so long ago.  
Crosses his heart and hope they never die.

 

       Joseph’s weak, almost pitiful voice rises from behind the door :

“Sebastian…? My arms hurt. My back hurts. I can’t even take my t-shirt off.”

Sebastian’s voice immediately answers his concerns, straightforward and orotund as they meet Joseph’s trembling and croaky words: “Do you want me to come in and help?”

Joseph answers with a low sound of agreement that Sebastian barely registers. He steps into the bathroom and Joseph is already looking at him. His arms are stuck in their position, bent, close to his chest.

“It hurts when I try to extend them,” he simply says. His voice is barely a sound and his words slide under a heavy breath.  
“Let me help,” Sebastian asserts, as if Joseph hadn’t been the one asking in the first place.

Sitting in front of Joseph, he takes a hold of the hem of his t-shirt and slowly pulls it up.  
Joseph raising his arms, still bent to an angle, over his head, Sebastian lifts inch by inch the light fabric off. When he dares glances to Joseph’s chest, he can see yellow bruises that have faded to their last hours, the ribcage that barely grazes under the skin — _god, thank god_ —, no other scars — not even bullet wounds that Sebastian’s mind was so fixated on finding upon Joseph’s flesh.  
Sebastian carefully disengages the sleeves from Joseph’s wrists in a final gesture to set him free, and Joseph’s arms fall back to his sides as Sebastian thoughtlessly discard the piece of clothing.  
Joseph runs a mindless finger over the bruises on his arms and Sebastian, pained eyes creeping with a horrified, slow realization, cuts off the wandering of his morbidly curious gaze as he asks:

“Do you need help with your pants? I can stay and help you with the rest too.”

Joseph slips a gaze in his direction. Through the heavy fog painting his dark irises pierces a faint awareness, a recognition, memories that taste like flavored water against the rugged tongue. Sebastian observes as he remembers Joseph calling his name with fervor as he woke up.  
Found, lost, found, lost. Alive and dead.  
Sleepwalking.

 

       Joseph doesn’t seem to find Sebastian helping him bathe uncomfortable. Sitting at the bottom of the bathtub, arms looped around the legs he has pulled to his chest, he wearily watches Sebastian’s hands run soapy circles on his back from over his shoulder.  
Sebastian lets out a laugh he hopes will cheer Joseph up.

“This is a weird change of pace, isn’t it? Remember when I was the one curled into a ball in the bathtub and you would help me like this?”

Sebastian sees Joseph’s eyes dart and blink.  
Seeking, searching.  
He remembers, yet he doesn’t.  
Sebastian’s throat tightens as the thought of Joseph never recognizing him creeps back into his lungs.

Under his palm, he finds a scar, then two.  
One at the base of Joseph’s back, perfectly aligned with his spine, the other a few inches lower. A small circle of raised, beige skin surrounding a single scarred spot of skin grown pink with the dept of the wound Sebastian can imagine running under the flesh makes up each of the cicatrices.  
The scabbing skin dissolves under the soap and a single red dot runs down Joseph’s skin.  
Something ill climbs into Sebastian’s ribcage and nestles in his guts. He mindlessly lets a finger brush over it. Joseph’s breathing stops completely and the white of his eyes flash over his shoulder as he glances at Sebastian.  
Sebastian pulls his hand and promptly runs the washcloth all over Joseph’s back.  
His mouth quirks with a grimace of fear, guilt and something horrifying and horrified and voiceless in the face of chaos burning the tip of his tongue.  
Joseph lets out a small, hushed “ouch” as Sebastian runs the washcloth over the thin red line running on the side of his neck.

 

       Getting Joseph out of the bathtub wasn’t an easy task, but after multiple minutes of splashing water around and awkwardly trying to wrap a towel around Joseph’s waist, Sebastian finally managed to help him settle on a small stool he kept in the bathroom for Lily to reach the mirror.

Joseph’s head, bowed under the exhaustion weighing down his heavy body, has the last few droplets running from his damp hair to the brim of his lips before crashing onto the tiles. His arms are still bent, mindlessly protecting his chest and stomach as he sits in wait.  
Sebastian walks behind him with a cotton pad wet with disinfectant in one hand and a batch of band-aids in the other. Joseph’s eyes blink heavily.  
The cold of the liquid on the cotton makes him shudder and the scars are wiped clean.  
Sebastian’s eyes don’t dare to leave the two cicatrices that, like eyes, are carving their inquisitive, questioning, cruel gaze into his.  
He feels like they could blink.

 

       Joseph limps less as he paces in the living room. Sebastian arranges pillows and cushions on the sofa, trying to fit a blanket into its cover. As he walks away from the tidied couch, Joseph walks to it.  
Sebastian interrupts him with a pressed hand:

“No! You don’t sleep here. You’re not gonna sleep here.”

Joseph manages the rise of an eyebrow.

“I’m lending you my bed,” Sebastian explains. “I’m the one who’s going to sleep here.”

He watches Joseph look at him with confusion barely piercing through the fog of his distracted eyes.

“When was the last time you slept in a good bed?” Sebastian asks with a heartfelt laugh that he hopes warms Joseph up.

He sees the way Joseph’s eyes flash with a flicker of reason and thought, immediately eclipsed by a doubt running deep within his very core, as if the little bare light that Sebastian’s words had turned on was immediately devoured by the merciless moths of the nightmares obscuring his memories of the last three years.  
Sebastian promptly accompanies Joseph to the bedroom.

_It’s been a while, hasn’t it?_

Sebastian doesn’t remember ever lending his bed to Joseph — his sofa had been visited multiple times during the many days they worked overtime and finished their investigations in Sebastian’s living room surrounded by empty cups of a tasteless coffee that made their hearts race. He remembers finding Joseph on the sofa, curled on his side under their piled up coats that he used as blankets. He remembers tapping Joseph’s forehead to wake him up after midday and greeting him with more coffee.

Sebastian doesn’t remember Joseph ever explicitly lending him his room — all he would do was wash onto Joseph’s sofa like a whale on the shore as Joseph tried to make him more comfortable by getting rid of his coat, tie, and shoes. Eventually, Sebastian’s crashing place officially became Joseph’s sofa, even though he remembers Joseph’s bedroom door always being half-open.  
Sebastian remembers stumbling into Joseph’s bedroom at an inhuman hour, his wailing poorly contained behind his gritted teeth as he hiccuped and snorted, and gracelessly flopping onto the soft rug at the feet of Joseph’s bed.  
He doesn’t remember climbing onto Joseph’s bed, or Joseph pulling him on, he doesn’t remember slipping or being slipped under the heavy blanket, but he remembers waking up in the comfort of Joseph’s bed, surrounded by warmth. Joseph had curled onto himself and rolled to the end of the bed to leave some room for Sebastian.

It’s his time, Sebastian thinks, to try to be a good friend.  
He owes him that, and even if he didn’t, even if he didn’t have three years to atone for,  
he wants to.  
He wants to wake Joseph up by tapping his forehead and to chuckle as he curls into a grunting ball again.  
He wants peace for his partner covered in bruises from crawling out of hell.

 

 


	6. No Coming Home With A Name Like Mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which adults have monsters under their beds.

        Sebastian’s eyes flicker to the ceiling as he lays, arms crossed under his nape, in the cradle of the sofa. The night is silent like it always is as an owl gently warbles in the distance.  
There hangs in the warm air the words Sebastian barely dares to confess as whispers to the night bugs watching him from the ceiling, a culpability that Sebastian feels beating to his temples in the flow of his blood, a fear. A fear, again, always.  
Waiting.

His eyes seek something in the corner of the dark room, as if the monsters his mind used to agitate like puppets in front of his eyes had crawled out of his ribcage and sat there in wait of midnight.  
His tongue goes dry as an instinct, a sudden impulse makes him jolt up, violently pulling him out of his half-sleep trance.  
As nothing but silence replies, Sebastian lets out a long sigh — that a scream, powerful with all the fear lungs are able to contain, cut by a heavy breath as if it was too loud to be held, cuts sharp.  
It’s Joseph’s voice.  
Sebastian’s could have recognized it between a million, but oh, the dread, the pure, unfiltered horror ringing like static to his ears makes his blood run so cold he cannot breathe. His eyes widen and all words leave his lips, horror gripping his guts into its fist and pulling him alive as if he was dying again.  
The raw, animalistic feeling of carnivorous panic tears at his skin and feasts at his empty lungs as if it was hell again, death again, an Armageddon hanging by the bloodied thread of Joseph’s voice ringing in his house.  
Slipping onto the blanket fallen on the floor, he runs to his room.

Joseph howls, and howls, and howls and when Sebastian bursts into his room his eyes have run wild, feral, panic blowing them red.  
Sebastian has never seen him like this, never heard him like this, and Joseph’s usually low, calm, composed voice breaking with nightmares, shredded by terror with more force than he has ever demonstrated, making his chest grotesquely spasm has Sebastian on the verge of losing his own mind.  
Lily’s head peeks through the door and Sebastian promptly turns towards her, hiding Joseph with his own body, and firmly but softly tells her :

“Lily, baby, I’m going to need you to wait in your room or in the living room. You can’t come in here right now.”

Lily’s doe eyes blink in incomprehension but she nonetheless nods and trots away. Sebastian closes the door as she disappears in the hallway.

As he walks towards Joseph, who had struggled himself out of the blankets and flopped onto the floor, he recoils in the corner and his hands frantically run the floor — looking for his gun.

Sebastian has no idea what is happening, no idea what is running wild in Joseph’s terrified head, no idea what makes his eyes so round with fear and his mouth open in a silent scream that his lungs have already emptied themselves of and his knuckles so white as he grips the shirt at his chest — but he runs to Joseph’s side, kneels next to him and firmly grabs his shoulders.

“Joseph,” he calls once, “Joseph, it’s fine! You’re with me, Sebastian, you’re out of there, you’re fine now. Joseph!”

Joseph’s eyes run like wild animals and gallop to the corners of the rooms, the ceiling, behind Sebastian, behind himself, seek his own face in Sebastian’s pupils. He is an open wound like a mouth, an endless scream and his grey face in Sebastian’s panicked eyes twitches as something devours his ribs from the insides.

“I’m out…?” Joseph chokes up, the words snapping in his throat as he pushes them out, “When…?”  
“You are,” Sebastian immediately insist, “I picked you up yesterday from the hospital, you’re at my house now. Everything is fine now.”

His face falls blank, his lips fall open.  
Joseph’s eyes blink, his lashes meeting in a sticky sound over his glassy gaze.

“How long was I gone…?”

Sebastian’s hand mindlessly reaffirm their grip over Joseph’s shoulders.

“... Three years.” Sebastian replies.

Joseph and his glassy, foggy, unfocused eyes twitch lightly. His mouth, still agape, doesn’t let out a sound.  
He blinks once, twice, light flickers in his darkened irises.  
His mouth quirks as his face contorts with fear, denial, relief, incomprehension, and this same, gut-wrenching expression of total loss painting his aghast features.  
Suddenly, his lips move, and Sebastian thinks he is going to whisper, but it is a loud, gravelly, clear even through the trembling words, howl that meets Sebastian’s alarmed eyes.

“ **_Why did it feel like ten fucking years!?_ **”

And under Sebastian’s hands, Joseph’s shoulders fall forward, stumbling into what he curls himself into, and as he brings one of his naked hands to his ghostly face, the other supporting the weight of what feels like his own corpse, his voice starts echoing in the suffocating room.

“ _Where was I gone, how was I gone, why was I gone…_ ”

The questions rush through his restless brain as his mouth falls open in a silent scream and his head drops even more.

“I can’t remember but I can’t forget, I have a hole in my mind—”

Sebastian’s guts are twisting in a knot like eels being wrung out of their blood and he pushes Joseph’s shoulders to make him sit upright.  
He has never seen Joseph this way, never heard his voice choking with this crippling fear, never heard him howl like a wounded beast — where did the proper, poised, assured detective go? Where did his calm, his cool, his collection go? Where did the Joseph pushing his axe into haunted guts, unbothered, go?  
_What did they do to him?_

“Joseph— Joseph, you’re fine! You’re safe! This is the real world!”

And at that, Joseph’s head jolts up.  
His eyes struggle to find Sebastian’s face and this deep dark fog still haunts them, but something more makes them sharp and piercing — defiance, it seems, defiance dripping with a fear that trickles into his irises and darkens them in a dread that wraps itself like hands around Joseph’s throat.

“How do you know? How do you know, Sebastian? I still hear the incessant beeping of a machine constantly watching over me as if it was a mocking god, and the ringing, the ringing, static like it’s gonna burst through my brain, like it’s a bullet making its way through my skull, and, and—”

And as Joseph’s head tilts back, Sebastian’s hands firmly cupping each side of his jaw, a thin, light path of blood paints itself red under Joseph’s nose.  
This crayon line worth of hemoglobin has Joseph freezing.  
His lost eyes grow wider, wider, they twitch in fear as his mouth falls open more, voice so thin it cannot even make up a single word, and the single drop of blood runs up and down the hills of Joseph’s parted lips.  
His breathing grows heavy, erratic, and Sebastian can feel his crazy heartbeat where his thumbs meet the skin of Joseph’s neck.

“Joseph,” Sebastian very calmly calls, hoping Joseph won’t notice how his voice croaks from the shock of seeing him this way, “Joseph, you are _not_ turning. You are not in STEM anymore.”

Joseph’s eyes find his.  
The fear has wilted like a poisonous flower under a heavy rain, and his brown irises flash of something that makes Sebastian’s heart jump to his throat and make him choke on air.  
_Sorrow_.

“If this is not STEM anymore, how are you there?”

Words fall, mute and wingless moths, out of Sebastian’s agape mouth.

“I… got out before you… without you.”  
“I waited,” Joseph says simply, and his voice trembles with a grief that pulls Sebastian’s lungs out of his chest and make him taste a blood that has turned sour with an overwhelming guilt. “I waited… for something but nothing ever came.”

Joseph’s voice dies on his chapped lips and Sebastian’s hand imperceptibly shake as they hold Joseph’s head straight.  
The anguish in his voice trembles like a thin branch in a heavy wind and the parasite of betrayal pierces through it.  
Sebastian’s lungs sink into his chest as the blame washes over his spine, and his hold thoughtlessly tightens over Joseph’s cheeks.  
Joseph doesn’t even sound mad, just…  
Disappointed.  
Hurt.  
The pain of the abandonment makes him sound so small as he aimlessly glances away, and Sebastian’s throat tightens as the shock makes him choke on air.  
Sebastian doesn’t remember hearing him like this, seeing him like this, and watching him so lost, anchorless, weak and wounded makes Sebastian feels even more disoriented.  
Where did Joseph go?  
Where did _his_ Joseph go?

“I know,” he finally manages to say, “I know, and I can’t apologize enough for that. You have my permission to beat my ass to make me pay for it, but—”  
“Why would I do that?” Joseph interrupts him.

There is a bit more of life in his voice, and he almost sounds clear again.  
_Him_ again.

“... Because you’re mad at me for leaving?”

Joseph looks away. Not in an act of defiance, or surrender, or acceptance, just of… thought.  
He blinks, slowly, and Sebastian can almost see the thoughts running behind his eyes.  
Something like light flashes in Joseph’s dark irises and he’s serious and composed again, then lost again.  
It flickers in the highlights of the brown of his eyes and Sebastian recognizes him, _him_ , and then doesn’t.  
Joseph is himself, then is not, then is… He swims between two seas of the person he once was and the person they left him to be.

Joseph ignores Sebastian’s last sentence and points and the red trail under his nose.

“Why…?”  
“Probably because you are very weak. You’re exhausted and your body is going to need some time to recover from… everything.”

Joseph slips a glance in his direction.  
It bears a faint, almost feeble glimmer that Sebastian recognizes.  
He recognizes it as a glance that used to hang in the air between them, from Sebastian to Joseph and never the opposite, a gaze bearing an interrogation, a demand, almost — but Joseph now doesn’t dare to be demanding, to be needy like Sebastian knows himself once was.  
A plea for a reassurance neither of them had, has or will have the guts to word.

“Can you promise me this is real?"  
“I promise on the lives of those I thought I lost.”

Joseph gives a simple nod. Sebastian thinks he sees a small smile toying at the corners of his mouth, but he fears it is just wishful thinking.

“Come on,” he finally encourages Joseph, “let’s get you cleaned up.”

Joseph nods.

 

       Lily’s shy head peeks in the half-open bathroom door.

“Is he okay…?” her coy, feeble voice asks.

Sebastian looks at the way Joseph’s eyes avoid the mirror, his hands rest in the crook of his elbows.

“He’s going to be.”

 

       Time walks the tightrope between the dead of night and little morning as Sebastian lays awake, honey eyes wandering the ceiling where moths whisper their secrets. The house is quiet, the air is warm, Joseph’s very low snoring reaches his ears through the door he insisted to keep open.  
_Joseph, Joseph, Joseph._

During the sleepless nights of the past three years he spent holding a gun to his temple to scare the nightmares away, Sebastian had wondered, pleading gods he didn’t believe in for an answer, what had become of Joseph. The thought of Joseph being alive never left his mind, roaming in his skull at all times, haunting, taunting, gut-wrenching.  
Sometimes these thoughts were a thin ray of hope, sometimes they were a curse of a burden of guilt, but never would they leave him.

Sebastian would recite to shadows, declare to daydreams each and every word he wished he had said before, he wished he could say one day.  
He would imagine for hours on end their reunion. Would Joseph hate him? Would Joseph had joined Mobius? Would Joseph recognize him? Would Joseph, would Joseph, questions to dawn as he cried over the graves he held in his heart of his little daughter and best friend.  
_Losing, losing, lost._

By a miraculous turn of fate, he got Lily back, he got Joseph back, he got himself back.  
He doesn’t know what pieces Lily has lost, Joseph has lost, he has lost.  
Sebastian doesn’t know what they took from him, what they did to him, how they bent and broke and twisted him, how deep the scars they left that weren’t from blood samples or nightmare-realm bullets run.  
He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know if he wants to know.  
All that’s certain is that Joseph needs him. Lily needs him.  
Selfless, self-effacing, sacrificing himself like a lamb to the fire Joseph doesn’t need to exist anymore — and maybe he doesn’t exist anymore at all.

No more lambs to the slaughter, no more nightmares to the throat, no more Ruvik, or Stefano, or Mobius, or whatever the fuck these sick fucks could invent.  
Just Joseph.  
Scarred, scared, ghost-eyed Joseph in a t-shirt too big for him.  
His friend, like in the good old days.

 

       It’s almost eight and Lily slips her arms in the shoulder straps of her bag, wriggling and wiggling as she tries to adjust them over her silhouette.  
It’s eight and Sebastian feels a weight on his chest, a burden between his lungs; he presses a hand to his ribcage and feels his own heart growing mad against his palm.  
_What is this? Why is this?_  
There rings between his ears, bubbling in his throat the bulky, dull thought of his reality losing threads like a thin silk scarf.  
Sebastian pats an empty mug with a paper towel as he tries to push the thought in a corner of his mind where it wouldn’t bother him.  
_But it does_ , it stays in place and insists like the ghosts playing with the curtains that scare Lily so much, and Joseph’s words tinkle to his ears in his own voice: “ _how do you know?_ ”

Like a high-wire walker rattled by a familiar voice calling his name in the public, Sebastian feels his grip slipping, slithering out of his grasp, and the mug he held starts falling with it.  
Sebastian’s mouth opens to tell Lily she’s going to be a little late for school, and a ray of sun spills into a drop of water in the sink — its reflection shines a light straight into Sebastian’s eye.  
Barely a hint, barely a hue, a pale amber that pierces his mind.  
A needle of light through his eye and suddenly the whole room is static, nothing but static.  
Crackling, sizzling, saturation, _a blindly light at the top of a lighthouse_ that, instead of guiding him, lost sailor on the rough sea, to the shore, poisons him, devours him, calls him into the cliff.

Like the blinking of an eye, the pounding of a heart, fleeting but violent, carved in his mind.  
He feels it chewing at his lungs, eating at his ribs, and suddenly his thigh starts to hurt with the pain of a blade wound.  
A blade wound and another _and another_ and now he feels the knife to his throat and to his temple and his own brain feels like it could ooze out of his skull — and he falls into a crouch, curled into his own chest, his mouth fallen open choking out soundless words as saliva drips down his lips.

“Daddy?”

The voice sweeps his thoughts like a storm, he feels his lungs go empty — and, tentatively, he looks up. His eyes rise to the face hovering over him.

“I’m okay, Lily,” he manages to croak when he catches his breath.

He pushes himself up, hands on his knees, slowly straightening his spine as he forces a smile he wants appeased.

“No. You’re not.”

Sebastian blinks. His lips quirk in the chimera of a reassuring smile and a pained grimace.

 

       He feels Lily’s gaze on him when he drives her to school. Her teacher is waiting for them at the doorstep, greeting them with an anxious, curious gaze. Sebastian’s lips curl in a painful smile and he instinctively gives her a thumb up.  
Her green round eyes see the cuts on his palm that porcelain pieces dug into his flesh and she doesn’t ask any question.

As Lily smacks a wet kiss on his stubbly cheek before walking into the building, Sebastian thinks, he isn’t in STEM after all.  
In STEM, Lily was still dead.

“Please take care,” Lily begs in his ear before letting go.

And maybe he was, too.

 

 


	7. Perfect Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joseph recalls and Sebastian gets a weird book.

       Sebastian watches the way Joseph watches him, watches the aghast wanderers of his eyes, lost in a realm he doesn’t recognize, watches the veiny hands Joseph looks at as if they weren’t his, watches him avoid his reflection as if it could jump out of the mirror at anytime.  
Sebastian’s skin crawls with the memory of this white ghost in STEM reaching for the face he doesn’t recognize through the mirror. He turns around and busies himself with cooking.

 

       Joseph spends a lot of time doing nothing. For hours on end he curls in Sebastian’s bed, almost completely hidden under the heavy blankets — like a child shielding himself from the monsters. He sits on the sofa, staring at the television screen that broadcasts nothing but black — sometimes, he promptly jumps out and recoils in a corner, swearing “ _fuck! fuck off!”._ Sebastian kneels next to him to talk him down.

 

       Joseph gets better, then worse. He rises and comes crashing down, he sits at the table doing conversation and then Sebastian finds him bent over the toilet bowl, holding his own head between two forceful hands as if he wanted to squash his own brain, at three in the morning.

Sometimes, Joseph’s nose drips with a single petal of blood, and Joseph’s eyes suddenly grow wide, so wide in his blue-cradled sockets, growing with fear as they seem ready to escape his skull; his hands extends shaking fingers in front of his horror-struck gaze as Joseph waits for them to turn red and purple with wounds and pus and blood bursting out of his flesh like poisonous mushrooms — but they never do. Sebastian gently nudges Joseph to the bathroom and helps him stop the flow.

Sometimes, Joseph’s nose drips with a single petal of blood, and Joseph watches it roll down his upper lips, cross-eyed to catch the path of little red drop. He instinctively brings his hand to his nose and a single, low “crap” escapes his lips. He then asks Sebastian for a tissue.  
And that’s at it.

 

       Joseph has joined them  at the table. As he looks up from his cooking and over his shoulders into the kitchen, he sees the way Joseph’s lips are curled in a very gentle, if a bit tired, smile as Lily happily blabbers on about her day.  
Sebastian sees the way Joseph’s head tilts, the way his brown eyes shine a faint gold with the setting sun, gleam with a drowsy repose. Sebastian sees the way his chest finally rises, slow and composed, and falls, calm and still.  
Sebastian’s mouth quirks in a smile that he desperately tries to contain but that digs into his cheeks and stretches his smile even more.  
He smiles, smiles, a choked breath of relief stumbles into his chest and he lets out an overwhelmed laugh of appeasement.  
His ribcage hurts with a staggering alleviation and his heart pounds with the force of a battering ram against his lungs as Joseph lays his calm, painlessly weary gaze upon his.  
This is it, isn’t it? This is him, this is Joseph again.  
Emerged from the deep dark waters, eyes kind in the slow batting of the lashes in fatigue.  
Sebastian feels his lips form the words “welcome home” but no sound comes out.  
Does there need to?

 

       Lily has helped Sebastian peel peaches and pears for the dessert. Her fruits are a bit funny-looking, a bit mashed into purée, but she doesn’t care as she picks pieces from the bowl. Sebastian gently scolds her as he brings to the main course to the table. Lily jumps on the food disposed into her plate like a tiger on an antelope and Sebastian hears Joseph’s faint laugh ring alongside his.

Sebastian watches the way Joseph takes a hold of his knife and fork. He feels himself hold his breath, eyes focused and sharp as he observes the way Joseph’s fingers curl around the cutlery.  
Joseph brings a piece of the meat to his mouth, and Sebastian’s hands join in a prayer as his chapped lips close over the food.  
Sebastian questions him, inquiring and hopeful in the way his voice lightly shake.  
Joseph’s eyes widen imperceptibly and Sebastian, fixated onto his newly-colored face, watches the way his pupils grow wider as he chews.  
When Joseph’s gaze rises from his plate to Sebastian’s face, his brown irises are alight with a shy, muffled, almost surprised joy.

“It’s good,” Joseph simply says. His voice is low from a weariness that his shoulders still bear but that his hands poke through as they reach for Sebastian, barely heard, unable to reach Lily — only Sebastian is here to hear, to listen, and his lips curl in smile he poorly manages to contain.  
“I'm glad.”

Joseph doesn’t eat much more, and Sebastian cannot be mad: it is his first real meal since he was brought home and Sebastian doesn’t dare to think about how long he didn’t get to eat something good.  
Lily asks Joseph if “he’s gonna eat all that”. He lets out a short chuckle as he slides his plate to Lily’s side.

 

       A dry, pained coughing heard from the bathroom makes Sebastian open an eye. He drowsily limps up the hallway, slipping a glance towards the clock — almost midnight.  
He pushes the door open to the sound of painful regurgitation and tedious choking to find Joseph curled over the toilet bowl.  
His shoulders are shaking with powerful shivers and his arms bend under his weight.

“Joseph?” Sebastian anxiously calls him as he walks to him.

Joseph lets out a choked coughing sound.

“Joseph, are you okay?”  
“‘s the food,” Josep manages with a hoarse, uncomfortably wet voice, “can’t process the food.”

Sebastian lays a hand between his shoulder blades and gives three powerful taps.

“Am I that bad of a cook?” he jokingly asks as concern clouds his voice.  
“It has been far too long since I ate solid food,” Joseph blurts out after another coughing fit, “my body can’t process it.”

As Joseph’s body convulses one more time over the bowl, Sebastian’s lungs sink into his guts at the implication of Joseph’s sentence.  
Brushing a wild lock out of Joseph’s face to keep it from getting dirty, Sebastian finally dares to ask, his voice croaking with an apprehension that creeps down his spine.

“... What did they feed you, then?”

Joseph pushes himself back on his heels, almost losing balance before Sebastian places an arm on his back to secure him and, with a painful, blood-curling slowness that unfolds before Sebastian’s eyes like a predicted nightmare, places a shaking hand over the bruises in the crook of his elbow.

Sebastian falls mute, his lips burning with questions he knows the answers to.  
He glances at Joseph, watching the way Joseph’s eyes grow unfocused and foggy as he traces the unnatural colors on his arms.

“Intravenous,” Joseph’s hushed, husky voice articulates in the silent cradle of the bathroom walls.

Sebastian’s fingers extend with the urge to pull Joseph’s hand away from the bruises.

“All my body needed they fed it intravenously. I remember the nurses who would come and switch the liquid bags — I don’t remember much, flashes of.. consciousness, I guess, between two neverending periods of sleep — they looked so…”

He falls silent, his lips still parted in a last word that hangs in the air.

“... Dead.”

Sebastian’s throat tightens with a rough, choked sound that spills from his lips.  
Joseph looks at him, absent, light, pale.

“I remember feeling when they pulled out the needle, sometimes, or when they voluntarily left the bag up so I would weaken.”

Sebastian’s chest hurts, burns, sinks and rises in a storm of disgust, and guilt, and anger, and he cannot manage a single word as Joseph mindlessly runs a finger over his bruises.

“I don’t remember the last time I had a real meal. I don’t remember having had a real meal at all…”

Sebastian’s arm over his back thoughtlessly forms a hold around his waist in a protective force that has Joseph barely raising an eyebrow.

“I think they told me that I would get a real meal if I put on one of their uniforms,” Joseph tells, voice ghostly and thin as his thoughts wander where Sebastian cannot find them, “if I joined.”

Sebastian realizes the way his arm has slipped around Joseph and promptly backs up, letting Joseph sit on the tiles.

“And what did you do?” he asks.

Joseph’s eyes dart to him. What looks like a smile — a distorted, sad yet mocking, pained yet playful — makes the corners of Joseph’s mouth twitch.

“I told them to go fuck themselves.”

For the better or for the worse.

Sebastian feels his lungs fill with a blood like bile and pus, sour like the water at the banks of the Styx, as his minds paints behind his eyeballs the picture of a Joseph working alongside Mobius — faceless, voiceless, dressed of black or of white, a ghost within a ghost, who would have seen him from behind his glasses, eyes empty, grey, running snow like a broken TV, and told him: _“who are you?”_  
Sebastian feels a powerful sob jumps in his throat, and the sound that spills from his lips as he forces it back down his lungs, to the well of terror he dug, makes Joseph slightly jump in surprise.  
Still shaking at the fear of his own imagination, Sebastian stands up and comes back with a glass of water that he gives Joseph with a hand that shakes, agitated with the demons of his own thoughts that threaten to devour him alive.

But Joseph didn’t join Mobius, didn’t accept the bait of their promises, and whether or not he should have, whether or not he would have survived it, is unimportant now.  
Joseph is here, Joseph lives, and as Sebastian takes a deep, shaky breath to try to collect himself, he feels Joseph’s head fall onto his shoulder.  
Sebastian lets his arm wrap around Joseph’s back one more time.

 

       Juli is at the door. The mid-morning sun cascades onto her stiff, uncomfortable figure. She awkwardly shuffles on one foot and the other. Sebastian raises an eyebrow as she doesn’t return his greeting. His eyes fall to the thick, hastily put-together batch of white sheets of paper she weights between her hands.

“What is that?” he asks.

As an answer, Juli’s arms shove the book against his chest.

“I found it,” she simply says. Her voice rings with a heavy fog of poorly-contained pain.

Sebastian takes it and Juli promptly pulls her hands back to her sides.

“You probably don’t want it. You probably don’t _need_ it, either. But I think you _deserve_ it.”

At that, Juli turns on her heels and promptly runs without even saying goodbye. Her agitated silhouette seems to shake in the morning wind like a leaf about to fall as the muffled sound of her boots heels fades in the distance. Sebastian grumbles something about the bad manners of today’s youth.

Flipping the heavy batch in his hands, he finds what would be the front cover.  
In small, black, formal letters on the blinding white page is spelled:

“ **OBSERVATION — ANALYSIS — REPORT**  
**MOBIUS “STEM NETWORK” EXPERIENCE**  
“STEM NETWORK” ©Mobius Inc. 2015  
**subject id:** 1541-J  
**from:**  October 2014  
**to:** end of experience (expected: October 2020)

 **_STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL_ **  
**_AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY_ **”

 

 


	8. Knuckles Dragged Against The Wall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sebastian wishes he never learned how to read.

       The silence hangs over Sebastian’s head like a sword of Damocles, the blinding lights dancing on the thread of its edge making Sebastian dizzy as he turns the first page with shaking fingers.  
The hill of white sheets, bright and sanitized like the haunting ghost of a hospital room, lays upon the kitchen table. Sebastian, perched on the edge of his stool, close to falling, leans over. With a distressed squint, he gazes upon the lines, the neverending trails of black ink running on the page, and on the one after, and on the one after, the small, squashed in characters cascading for an eternity.  
_No, not an eternity — three years._  
Three long years packaged in a batch of white papers under a seal.  
His eyes find the first word. He reads.

 

“ **10/15/14 1345J**  
**NEW SUBJECT FILE CREATED : ODA J. 2014**  
**starting STEM check**  
**STEM stability**  
67% stable  
**assimilation pod**  
entrance link [OK]  
exit link [OK]  
saved settings [OK]  
STEM connection [OK]  
fluid temperature [OK]  
fluid connection [OK]  
**preparing assimilation pod**  
**assimilation pod prep OK**  
> **INSERT SUBJECT**  
> **PLUGGING** : subject 1541-J”

 

Sebastian’s fingers curl on the paper. The noise it makes as it crumbles in the hold of his knuckles turning white is thin, sharp, and Sebastian doesn’t even budge as the sheet chips the pad of his thumb

 

“ **SUBJECT STATE:** stable 92%  
> **BEGIN ASSIMILATION?**  
[y]  
*ASSIMILATION STARTED — 5%  
*ASSIMILATION IN PROGRESS — 36%  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable 78%  
*ASSIMILATION IN PROGRESS — 66%  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable 50%  
*ASSIMILATION IN PROGRESS — 89%  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable 35%  
> **WARNING: REACHING ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS**  
*ASSIMILATION COMPLETED  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable 50%  
> **ENTERING STEM SYSTEM**  
**09/15/14 1351J ENTERING STEM [OK]** ”

 

Sebastian’s throat tightens in a choked, wet hiccup and he has to run to the bathroom as his stomach jumps into his chest.

He comes back to the table with trembling, sweating hands, his eyes burning with a horror and a rage making his saliva turn sour.

 

       Sebastian’s eyes run the unstopped pages, word after words, minute after minute, watching Joseph’s hell unravel, mute, forever inked in these thousands of words, unchangeable, unforgiving.  
Between the small black letters he observes Joseph being plugged in and out of machines with names longer than his list of scars, the words changing as his different cradles rock him in and out of consciousnesses.  
Experiment, experiences, sometimes followed after a short, almost mockingly apologetic asterisks mentioning that they are trying to “better” their final STEM product by playing with Joseph’s mind that Sebastian sees thinning into threads between the words.

 

“ **SUBJECT STATE** : stable 47%  
*HEARTBEAT : 098 bpm  
PANIC SIGNAL [link OK] : 5.9  
PAIN SIGNAL [link OK] : 3.5  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable 40%  
*HEARTBEAT : 109 bpm  
PANIC SIGNAL [link OK] : 6.3  
PAIN SIGNAL [link OK] : 3.6  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable 18%  
*HEARTBEAT : 124 bpm  
PANIC SIGNAL [link OK]: 9.4  
PAIN SIGNAL [link **error** ] :  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable 10%  
*HEARTBEAT : **error** bpm  
PANIC SIGNAL [link **error** ] : **error** %  
PAIN SIGN  
> **WARNING : LOSS OF SIGNAL IN** [area 12-16L]  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable **error** %  
*HEARTB  
> **WARNING : TOTAL LOSS OF SIGNAL**  
> **START EMERGENCY EXTRACTION?**  
error  
**STARTING EMERGENCY EXTRACTION**  
**EMERGENCY EXTRACTION COMPL** error  
**UNPLUGGING** : subject 1541J  
**SUBJECT** error **SUCCESSFULLY UNPLUGGED FROM STEM SYSTEM** ”

 

And there cut short the unstoppable trail of words three blank lines.  
Sebastian stays mute, his voice dead on his agape month, the silence around him and the blank lines under his eyes feeling like the unnatural, unnerving, ominous quietude following the gut-twisting and deafening noise of a car crash.  
The silence of the dead ones.

 

“> **PLUGGING** : subject 1451J  
**SUBJECT STATE** : stable 60%  
*HEARTBEAT : 105bpm”

 

And it went on.  
On. And on. And on. And on.

Sebastian’s guts twist violently under his flesh like agonizing eels and, as nausea tightens a chokehold around his throat, he jumps up and runs into the bathroom door.  
He throws up the poison-draped lovechild of a sob and a howl, bile slipping past his lips and acidic tears burning his lashes  
From his bedroom, Joseph peeks a worried, drowsy head in the half-open door.

 

 

       When Joseph walks to him, crouching next to him as his chest spasms and convulses, desperately trying to puke the horror-born nausea that cripples his entire body, and puts a kind, light hand between his shoulder blades, Sebastian promptly grabs his wrist.  
Holding Joseph’s gloved hand in a powerful hold, Sebastian manages to articulate, choking through sobs sparking in his chest, pounding against his ribs as if they were trying to burst through his flesh:

“ _I’m so fucking sorry._ ”

Joseph blinks once, twice.  
His fingers curl in his palm, as if they had desired to curl into Sebastian’s. Longing, unacknowledged, for an invitation.

“Me too.”

 

 


	9. Falling Milk and Dripping Honey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joseph... 
> 
>  
> 
> (content warning for light "horror video game-typical" descriptions of violence)

       Lily is at school. She left with a wide smile and a small red pool in a hollow on her gums. In the early morning, Sebastian collected her small, pink-stained tooth in a tissue she brought with teary eyes.

“Daddy!” she cheeped, “Daddy, daddy! Another one!”

Sebastian took the white fallen flower into the cup of his hands.  
He planted a kiss on the cheek Lily enthusiastically lended, praised her strength as she poked the red gum.

“I’m growing up!” she chuckled.

Sebastian’s throat grew tight, wringing out a thin, choked stream of a dying breath as his lips curled into a smile.

Lily is growing up.  
Lily lost tooth after tooth, out of his sight, out of his heart, when he thought he had buried his baby with all of her milk teeth.  
She lost her teeth and he lost the first, and only time he could see her bring the first fallen one to him.  
A hole haunts Sebastian’s mind, a void that snatched every centimeter Lily grew when he thought her curled, forever a child, in a small wooden box, every inch her hair thrived, every ponytail she held her mane in, every discovery her bright eyes fell upon, every night she hid one of her lost teeth under her pillow.  
There is a void and that void saw Lily grow up more than Sebastian did. Sebastian closed his eyes on a seed dying to a merciless winter and opened them to a small, mighty tree in bloom.  
Lily looks at him like she never left, and he cannot stop looking at her like she never came back.  
Closing his arms around her and patting her dark hair, inherited from him, Sebastian’s mind rings with the thought of finding nothing but empty as he’d pull her to his chest — and yet Lily is still here, in his arms, trotting to him when he parks in front of the school.

Lily is alive, and his poor mind thinks he’s living with a ghost.

 

        Joseph lays in Sebastian’s bed, his hand crossed over his chest as they rest over the heavy blanket. His brown eyes seem two holes in his pale face, at the bottom of which an incurious ghost stares at the ceiling.  
Sebastian watches Joseph watch his own thoughts behind his own inattentive gaze, seeking on his partner’s visage a hint of vitality — but nothing lights up his dark pupils. Joseph’s stare runs the canvas over his head, eyes swinging slowly like the pendulum of a clock from one side of the room to the other. His lips rest ever so slightly parted in a silent interrogation, his hands twitch silently. He searches.  
_Searches for what?_  
He hums, and sometimes jerks up, as if suddenly awaken, before falling back on his pillow.  
He eventually turns to Sebastian who, lying on his side, propped on an elbow, scans Joseph’s face with a dark gaze whispering of a dulling apprehension.

Joseph asks him the time, then the day, and Sebastian gives them to him. Joseph hums in what doesn’t sound like comprehension, or agreement, or anything, really.  
Something that doesn’t _sound_.  
Something hollow.

Sebastian’s fingers find the first scar on Joseph’s back, at the base of his neck. He watches the way Joseph’s body twitches like the bat of an anxious eye and his breath knocks against the walls of his throat when Sebastian’s fingertips touch his skin. Sebastian’s heart punches the bony part of his sternum as a spark of light flickers in Joseph’s eyes.

“These,” he finally manages to ask, his voice husky and hushed as air struggles to carry his words, “how did you get these?”

Sebastian realizes he should have asked “ _how did they give you these_ ” as one of Joseph’s eyebrows rise in a faint, tired interrogation. His hand comes to feel the scar, as if he had forgotten about it, and Sebastian promptly pulls his hand away when Joseph’s uncaring and clumsy hand runs over his.

“Experimental STEM entrance pod,” Joseph finally says after a long silence in which Sebastian saw his eyes light up, flicker with questions and distress, search behind his eyelids memories carved raw into his skin — Sebastian almost tells him to not mind it, he doesn’t need to know that bad.  
“Experimental…?” Sebastian asks, his stare drilled onto Joseph’s ungloved fingers as they draw the eye of the scar.  
“Subjects were kept in an upright position,” Joseph begins to recite, voice thin and veiled as it echoes, soundless, distant, in his empty chest, “with two cables linking them to the central system: intervertebral C4-C5 link an T5-T6 link.”

His voice is aloof and hollow, throwing up words that do not belong to him.  
A mantra, a chant.

“Main goal of the experience is to more accurately measure and control nervous messages sent through the spinal cord in order to improve the immersion system of the STEM mainframe,” Joseph reels off in a breath, words dancing in his mouth like puppets in someone else’s hands.

His fingers slide off his skin and his hand finds his other. They meet in a prayer.

“... and did it work?” Sebastian asks in a soundless, trembling voice.

Joseph turns to him. A faint, almost reticent light brings a hint of gold to his exhausted irises.

“I don’t know,” Joseph answers, a muffled, choppy chuckle making his voice croak, “I was dead.”

 

       Sebastian watches the empty, jaded, pitifully ironic smile curling Joseph’s chapped lips.  
Joseph seems to float behind his darkened eyes, each batting of his lashes slow as if he lived after the very fact of passing time.  
Where has he gone? When was he gone? Why was he gone? What is left of the man who once picked up a piss-drunk Sebastian from the bar and sternly secured the seatbelt over his prostrated, wailing body before driving him to his apartment is a ghost with chapped lips and hands that fly in front of his face as if he thought they didn’t belong to him.  
A shell waiting to burst open with scars on the brain and the boiling volcanic waters of nightmares — just memories, actually, which made it all worse — waiting to spill over and burn him alive.  
A ticking bomb with the smile of a drugged up man.

Sebastian has never seen Joseph smile so much in the nine years they have worked together — reserved, composed Joseph barely cracked a smirk.

Sebastian can count on a single hand the times he have seen his lips quirk up: late at night when all the coffee finally wore out and Sebastian’s terrible jokes fused in the poorly-lit room to try to keep them both awake; early in the morning when a (sober) Sebastian, who had crashed on his couch in the evening to work on a case during the night, nudged him in the shoulder with a dry laugh to thank him for the coffee; a single time, after a frantic chase around the city, tailing a killer in Sebastian’s shitty car, and two stab wounds patched up at the hospital. That time, they stopped by a park at daybreak, a drink pulled from the closest coffee shop open at this inhuman hour in one hand, and gracelessly let themselves fall on the first bench they came across. Sebastian leaned forward to minimize the pain of his wound and Joseph held his strained arm to his chest.

“Hey,” Sebastian called Joseph, voice barely a whisper in the slowly-waking city.

Joseph turned to him.

“Nice fucking work, detective,” he said, and held his closed hand for a fist-bump.

Joseph threw his head back and hiccuped two sharp bouts of laughter. He took his drink in his other hand to reciprocate Sebastian’s gesture of celebration.

“Yeah,” he sighed, and Sebastian could see the smile toying with the corners of his mouth. “Let’s not to that again.”

“Let’s.”

And they drank.  
Another time, Sebastian found Joseph’s gaze on him. Unfocused, light, distracted but not empty. His lips were curled in a delicate, peaceful smile.  
When Joseph noticed Sebastian watching, he promptly turned away and his smile disappeared.  
Sebastian never brought it up.

 

       Joseph’s haggard gaze, wan hands and emaciated smile light up in Sebastian’s mind the beacon of memories drowned in the amber of the burning, artificial sun that hung over their heads in their last shared adventure.  
They make Sebastian’s eyes burn with the reflection of this dying light on the barrel of a gun Joseph once brought to his temple — and with tears that he feels climbing in his throat and chokes on as he tries to swallow them down.

Sebastian begins :

“Do you still have…”

He makes the motion of a gun being brought under the chin and the trigger pulled. Joseph’s gaze flinches as a spark of spirit quivers in the heavy fog under his eyes and he promptly shakes his head.

“Not anymore,” he answers.

Another choppy, dry laugh slips past his lips and he adds:

“I’m pretty sure my brain thinks I’m already dead.”

Sebastian’s voice jumps from his throat in a croaky, embarrassed, awkward burst of a dry, sour laugh and he promptly asks, gesturing vaguely with a trembling hand at the room around them and his face:

“Then what would that make _this_?”

Joseph’s dark eyes glance at his face quirked in an uneasy, forced humoristic grimace, and fall upon it with a long, fixed gaze resounding with a something that makes Sebastian’s lungs go dry — powerful yet afraid, helpless yet mighty, devoured with hope and want.  
Sebastian feels like his own eyes grow blind and they fall upon Joseph’s lips, where he reads, clear as dawn, clear as day, almost too stunned to register it as the words unfold under him:

“ _Heaven._ ”

 

       Laying next to Joseph has become a habit. Combing his tired face for a spark of sudden light, observing the thin, linear scar on the side of his neck fading slowly, asking questions, dumb questions, hearing his voice.  
_His voice, his voice, his voice…_  
It grew low, small, fatigued when Sebastian was away, rings flat over words, but by god, it is Joseph’s.  
It is Joseph’s, and it sounds like him, and in the air, it feels like him, and his voice lulls Sebastian’s memories out of his chest as he remembers gold-lit evenings spent in his office, arched like hunchbacks over the papers displayed on his desk.  
It’s Joseph’s voice, and if he could he’d ask him to speak for hours, for the three years he thought it had died in a nameless penumbra, muted forever.

 

       Hearing Joseph’s nightmares out of his mouth makes Sebastian’s skin turn cold, so cold, and as Joseph’s voice echoes in the warm room, devoid of substance like a pitted peach, Sebastian feels like his partner’s phantasms are crawling up his spine in an iced, wet spider walk.

Joseph often doesn’t remember much, questions out of Sebastian’s mouth making his eyebrows rise in a confusion that has Sebastian’s mind screaming in pain.  
Sebastian tries to make him talk, at least the tiniest bit, a morbid curiosity gnawing at his guts as his brain twists and turns his very existence into nightmares he bears in his sleepless nights.  
Sebastian wants, _wants_ to know, and yet he doesn't. He wants to push himself to fear and back, he seeks a thrill, a horror that, he will never admit, the scabbing scars on his psyche crave.

Holding his hands in front of his face, eyes unfocused and confused as if he didn’t recognize them, Joseph stars rambling:

“I remember being in STEM, in the simulations, walking — I would just, I would just walk, but then I didn’t have — no arms, for example, and no hands, yes, no arms, I think, I would have holes in my shoulders, holes in my — on my ribs? Ribs.”

Sebastian’s eyes twitch.

“I would just be missing a whole arm and, and that was it, really — it hurt? Huh, I wouldn’t die. I would be — what’s the w-word, hemorrhage for what felt like hours — huh, we didn’t have hours in STEM. So yeah.”

Sebastian feels his hands curl into a fist. His nails bite at the thick skin of his palms, his teeth dig into the inside of his cheek as he feels his stomach erratically spasm in dread and terror as nausea creeps to the back of his throat.  
Composed and well-spoken Joseph, bright brown eyes, adjusting gloves onto his wrists, _where has he gone? Where has he gone?_  
Joseph stutters and stumbles upon his own words, fails to articulate as if he was chewing on fog.

“And I just wouldn’t die!” Joseph snorts, and Sebastian tastes in his voice the sour bile of a suicidal disappointment, of a wish left hanging under the skin.

Joseph runs a finger over one of his knuckles.

“I wouldn’t die. I would just see my bones and my blood pouring and I wasn’t even afraid or in pain. Not anymore.”

He lets out a sharp, short laugh that quirks in a croak, a hiccup that has Sebastian think he’s going to cry or start to scream.

“When the therapist I was seeing as a teenager told me I ‘needed to find what was really inside’, I don’t think this is what she had in mind.”

Joseph jokes and laughs, and he sounds so aloof, so detached, so calm as if he had crossed the line of reason a long, long while ago, that Sebastian storms out of the room as he feels like puking.

He crouches behind the door, his back banging against it as he gracelessly falls onto his ass. A hand covering his mouth, his breathing erratic through his nostrils widening in revulsion, Sebastian feels his guts curling and twisting as if they were snakes under his skin and he throws his head back as to choke back a painful, barking sob.

Joseph’s voice, faint, muffled, ringing this high-pitched hints of pained panic and incomprehension echoes from behind the door:

“... Sebastian?”

Sebastian manages to jolt back on his feet.

“I’m right here. Gimme a minute.”

He hears the short noise of acknowledgment Joseph makes as, he imagines, he nods.  
He promptly strides back to the bed, onto which he mannerlessly flops. Joseph’s brown eyes on him interrogate him with a tilt of the head.

“More. Tell me more,” Sebastian barks. His voice croaks with a poorly-contained pain but Joseph doesn’t seem to register it. “How. Where.”

Joseph looks at him with a confused eyebrow raised and parted lips. He takes his hand to his wrist, to his elbow, to his shoulder, traces over the tee-shirt Sebastian lended him wounds he still dreams of, wide awake.

“Here,” he comments, his voice in recollection, thin through the veil of memories adding salt on the scars running through his brain, “here too… I think I lost my head once too,” he attempts to joke.

And that’s too much.

Sebastian’s voice dies on his lips as he barely manages a raw, animalistic cry of anguish and his hands, that he had buried in the sheets to grasp the tearing fabric until his knuckles turned white, frantically jump to Joseph’s face.  
Sebastian has barely the time to catch the way Joseph every so subtly flinches when his hands cup his head and his lips crash in an aching, gut-wrenching, wrecked kiss onto Joseph’s forehead.

Joseph makes a short, sharp sound of surprise as Sebastian pulls him closer, closer, presses his entire face against him and brings Joseph’s head against his throat.

Affection pours from Sebastian’s chest like blood from a wound, like rain in a thunderstorm — unstoppable, almost destructive, almost aching.  
Affection — painfully obvious platonic affection for his colleague, his partner, _his friend —_ he didn’t have, or didn’t know he had, or didn’t think he had — maybe he grew it during the nights they spent making coffee for each other over a heated case, maybe he grew it during the nights Joseph left his bedroom door open for him to crawl in, drunk and desperate, maybe he grew it in hell, maybe he grew it in purgatory, maybe he grew it and smothered it or swallowed it or refused to look at it — but who cares, _who the hell cares now._

Three years, _three fucking years_ away from him, three years where Sebastian had nightmare after nightmare, dreamed of Joseph’s disappointed eyes onto him and, as he’d open his mouth to apologize, Joseph’s would fall open in a cascade of blood, three years where Sebastian sought and hoped and abandoned over and over, prayed to a god he doesn't even believe in anymore, stuck himself in cycles and in drunken nights until he was tearing at the seams, being pulled apart by guilt.  
_Three fucking years_ where he didn’t know whether death or still being alive at Mobius’ hands was a worst fate for Joseph, three years he spent begging Joseph was at peace wherever he was.  
Three years without Joseph’s voice, Joseph’s leather gloves snapping fingers in front of his eyes to keep him awake, three years he spent imagining horror, and now, he knows — _it was fucking worse than what he has ever imagined._

His hands tremble as they hold Joseph’s head, his breath runs like a cornered wild horse’s in his aching lungs, and he feels Joseph’s arms tentatively close around him.

“... This is bad, isn’t it?” Joseph’s small, low, but suddenly so so clear voice asks.

Sebastian manages a confused, questioning grunt.

“What went on. It’s so very bad.”

Sebastian lets himself slowly pull away from Joseph.

“It was so fucked up,” he reads on Joseph’s lips.

And Sebastian sees.  
Sebastian sees the way Joseph sees, his brown eyes gleaming, wet, suddenly blown wide, wide open, wide awake.  
Wide awake.  
His voice echoes from the depths of his chest, low, potent, mighty even in the fear that scrape this words thin.  
Joseph has risen, Joseph has spoken — risen from a grave with pure, unfiltered horror blowing his pupils like black holes at the bottom of the well of his eyes.  
His hands tighten their hold over Sebastian, nails involuntarily digging in Sebastian’s skin as realization washes over him.  
Consciousness shakes his core, his ribs, his lungs, he struggles to catch his breath.

“Sebastian.”

Sebastian nods.  
Joseph looks at him.  
Sees him.  
Joseph who jumped from a never-stopping train of nightmares and who, having finally found solid ground under his feet, stares, watches.  
Lost and found  
Found.  
_Found_.  
Wide awake, at last.

 

 


	10. I'll wait out this storm for you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joseph is awake, and Lily wishes she wasn't.

       Conversation is easier now that Joseph is awake.  
Awake. What a strange word to use for the light that rings in the dark brown pits of his eyes, make his lips quirk and curl when Sebastian tries a terrible joke.  
He still holds his arms a bit close to his chest, his smile a bit hollow sometimes, but Sebastian sees, in the red hue on his cheeks, his ears, his nose, how life flows within. He wears his gloves not as a camouflage but as a price, just like he used to do.  
Sometimes, mindlessly, instinctively, he readjusts the gloves on his wrists, straightens his clothes and snaps his chin up. He smiles at Sebastian when he catches him looking in his direction.  
Sebastian can almost smell the citrus scent of the Cologne Joseph used to wear, a peaceful eternity ago.

 

       Conversation is easier, now that Joseph is awake, but Sebastian only dares to open his chest when Joseph dozes off in the purple hue of the rising night. Joseph’s voice has found its composed, elegant power again — this strength that Sebastian lost sleep over as it seemed dead and buried under Joseph’s aghast eyes — and Sebastian welcomes it, pretends he doesn’t actively seek it as he asks Joseph nonchalant, detached questions.  
It rings to his exhausted ears like safety, like peace, and this placid gaze he can read on Joseph’s eyes make his heart beat faster — not in an erratic, anxious way. Just in a serene, content rhythm that means “ _I’m right here, I’m right here, hear me, for you are alive, just like he is_.”

Joseph looks at him for what seems like hours on end as they lay next to each other. Sebastian talks, his tongue untying knots that three years of loneliness had twisted his guts into.  
He talks about Lily’s day at school, about his cat — and, when asked about why he named it “Joe”, his reddened face promptly turns away as he blurts out excuses — about each drawing he hung on the walls.  
He doesn’t dare to talk about the nightmares, the debilitating gap in his chest he felt for three years, the multiple nights he thought he’d drank himself to death and his last coherent thought was how angry Joseph was going to be; he doesn’t talk about the picture of Joseph he dreamed (was it a dream?) he held in his hands, the questions that make his chest ache — _where were you_ gone _, how were you gone, why were you gone, did you feel alone?_  
Sebastian tries to fan the light in Joseph’s eyes, tries to bring it to his mouth to make him speak.  
They lay for eternities, curled on their side and facing the other, reading his face under the sleep that’s creeping up.  
Sebastian doesn’t notice the way Joseph’s fingers twitch and how he curls his hands in fists as to restrain the fleeting gesture — how they try to reach, ever so subtly, Sebastian’s smile on his lips.

They lay for eternities in the warm silence of the empty house as Lily is at school, and Sebastian’s chest aches.  
It aches, it aches, the excruciating pain feels like a blessing as it grows with each sincere quirk of Joseph’s lips in a sleepy smile, each blink of his eyes in a heartfelt, content tiredness.  
Sebastian’s chest hurts and sings with the vision of Joseph rolling around and stretching, yawning, blissfully conscious, blissfully _himself_ again. He grunts and moans as he rubs his eyes, he crosses his arms over his eyes as the light hits his face and he grumbles, and Sebastian wonders if he has made a deal with the devil to be able to see Joseph like this again.

Sebastian’s chest aches with the way Joseph looks at him, the way his eyes gleam a peaceful, contented gold, the way his weary, but oh, so painfully sincere smile touches Sebastian’s gaze.  
It aches, it aches, and soon Sebastian’s minds is turning black as a sky before a storm as something grows within — tasting like guilt, feeling like guilt, the way Joseph looks at him, almost dreamy, almost happy, making his thoughts race.  
“ _This is not what you think it is_ ”’s and “ _You’re imagining things”_ ’s dance with the “ _What the fuck do you think you’re doing?!_ ”’s in his confused thoughts.  
He isn’t looking at Joseph, and Joseph isn’t looking at him like he think he is, and he shouldn't revel, relish, carouse in his gaze — this is not _this kind of gaze,_ he makes himself carve into his ribs as his heart pounds against them, _this is not this kind of gaze._  
Joseph’s eyes soften, still anchored on his face, when he looks away.

 

       Sebastian brings food on a plate too small for its contents — sauce spills onto the table and Lily’s sharp, excited laugh echoes in the room. She bats her hands as Sebastian asks Joseph if he can serve her — he sees the way Joseph’s heartfelt, lively nod brings out his appeased smile.

“Daaad, can Joseph play cards with me when dinner’s over?”

Sebastian slips an anxious gaze in Joseph’s direction.  
Joseph offers Lily an amused laugh, and as he straightens his gloves on his fingers, he replies:

“I can try! You’ll probably win every game.”

Lily offers a comical wiggle of her eyebrows.

“Maybe so!”

Joseph’s voice ignites in a tinkling laugh and Sebastian’s lips curl in a wide, fervent smile that he promptly tries swallows back as when his partner’s eyes fall upon his face.

 

       Sebastian pushes the bathroom door open. He expects to see Joseph bent over the toilet bowl, struggling to catch his breath, but he finds him sitting next to it, eyes pondering, hand on chin, confused in a light, attentive way as his head tilts when Sebastian walks in.

“Food’s staying down?” Sebastian asks, his hand reaching for Joseph’s.  
“Food’s staying down,” Joseph replies, and a delighted surprise tings his voice.

Sebastian catches the hand Joseph throws his way.  
The feeling of Joseph’s warm, slightly dry, bare palm against his makes an electrifying shiver run up his smile.  
As he guides Joseph to his room, being offered a soft, calmly contented “ _good night, Sebastian”_ , he feels his hand throbbing with what would feel like pain — and as Joseph smiles at his reply, it feels like a blessing.

He looks down at his rugged, coarse hands, the warmth of Joseph’s palms haunts his skin like the ghost of a kiss — _a kiss, a kiss_ , oh, how he wishes he wore gloves.

 

       Joseph’s arms still ache, his neck is still sore, the scars on his back still sometimes throb with the weakening strength of nightmares fading away. Sebastian follows him to the bathroom, at least to help him out of his t-shirt. He pretends it isn’t awkward, he pretends Joseph’s milky skin under his fingertips doesn’t wake within him monsters and nightmares, dripping of intrusive thoughts like salt over the scars in his brain, dripping of fear, ringing with the raw memory of looking for a wound under Joseph’s vest, ringing with guilt, guilt, _guilt_.  
Guilt to three wasted years, guilt to ice blue eyes in the mask of a fair-skinned ghost.

The eye-shaped scars running Joseph’s spine need care and Sebastian is the one applying it, perched on a stool behind Joseph.  
They have turned a light, faded pink on the skin, barely rough, almost sanded. Joseph mindlessly looks at his fingers as Sebastian’s run the cicatrices.

“Are those self-inflicted?” Sebastian’s voice rises in the silent cradle of the pale walls.

Joseph starts to turn to him to ask him what the hell this is about before he spots the finger Sebastian points towards his forearms.  
The scars streaking his arms are barely noticeable on his skin, a pearly white that one struggles to even see, thin as sewing threads.  
Sebastian observes Joseph’s eyes on them, Joseph’s silence.  
It rings empty, yet full of questions.  
Questioning, shocked, voiceless, almost scared.  
It means everything, and it means naught. Sebastian decides he’s never going to ask again.

 

       It’s Lily’s voice.  
It is high, harsh, sharp, terrified — a neverending scream that Sebastian has already heard in this deepest, darkest nightmares.  
Sebastian jolts awake and his gut jolts with him, his heart rams into his throat and he feels his lungs caving in. He calls Lily’s name — desperate, voice croaking, high in pain — and, as he stumbles into the hallway, her voice bursts into dry, breathless, unarticulated sobs.

“MOOOM — _MOMMY_ , MOMMY, I WANT MOMMY!”

Her sobs turn into a cry, the blood-curdling cry of a terrified animal, and when Sebastian bursts into her room, almost breaking the lock, she’s standing on her bed, raised tall on her tiptoes as she howls, howls, _howls_.

As he runs to her bed, Sebastian frantically, urgently calls her: “Lily, Lily, baby.”  
Her guttural cries dissolve in hiccuped, jerky whines and Sebastian promptly sweeps her off her feet as he pulls her into his arms, locking her in an embrace.

She wails, and wails, and wails, her voice trembling in exhaustion even though it doesn’t die as she restlessly leans, body limp and heavy, against her father’s shoulder. Sebastian carries her, legs trembling with shock under their weights, to the living room.  
As he sits in the couch, Lily on his lap as she breathlessly cries in the crook of his neck, Joseph’s head peeks from the bedroom.  
When Sebastian manages a glance in its direction, his large hands rubbing circles that seek to soothe the wet, soundless bursts of cough that Lily barks out, Joseph is standing next to the couch.  
He seems awkward, a concerned look carving a line between his eyebrows.  
Sebastian sees the way he tries to keep a distance, but doesn’t know how far he should stay. Wanting to fit in, but not intrude.  
Sebastian offers him a slow, weary blink of his eyes that make Joseph take one unsure step forward.

“ _Mooom_ ,” Lily calls like a kitten crying for its mother, “I want mom…”

Through a slurred, thick, furred voice, Sebastian manages to articulate, guilt and sorrow and fatigue making his tongue heavy:

“Mom’s not here anymore.”

The words make his throat tightens and pain sparks in his chest in a dull, pounding ache against his ribs.

 _“I want mooooom…”_  
“I know, sweetie, I know… but it’s impossible.”

In his arms, on his lap, Lily’s body grows heavier and limper. Exhaustion seems to catch up on her as her head takes a slow nosedive into the crook of his neck.

“Mommy’s dead?” she asks, and her voice, small and hushed, seems veiled by sorrow.

 _What the fuck do I answer? What the fuck do I answer?_  
How does one explain loss and love to a ten-year-old, how does one explain the cupidity and greed and hunger that drove Mobius to devour, how does one explain the selfless sacrifice of martyrs, of saints, to a girl still learning how to do fractions?

“Not really, baby… but we won’t see her again.”

Lily’s voice breaks in an animalistic, wounded croak and she pants in Sebastian’s neck.

“She didn’t abandon us,” Sebastian whispers, his mouth pressed to Lily’s burning forehead, to Lily’s tangled hair, “she left to make sure we could be together and safe again.”

Sebastian hears Lily swallow loudly as she gulps down a sob.

“I want mommy…”  
“I know, sweetheart,” Sebastian murmurs against her temple, “I know.”

After a second, a heartbeat, a blink of an eye, a breath let out as it was held, he adds:

“Sometimes, I do too…”

Sebastian sees, out of the corner of his eye, Joseph taking another step in their direction.  
His hands rub Lily’s back as her own, small and tense, dig into his arms.

“I miss her,” Lily’s weak, wounded voice breaks the silence.

Sebastian’s heart knocks at the brim of his lips.  
Lily’s voice, so sharp and clear before, dissolved like sugar in milk, like rain in a puddle — it broke. Broke softly, a porcelain doll slipping to the ground.  
Tainted with a sweet, soft, wounded resignation.  
From rage to sorrow. From shock to grief.  
From want to mourning.

“Me too, sweetheart,” Sebastian’s small, low, invisibly scarred voice answers. “Me too…”

Lily starts crying again, softer this time.  
A fairy’s tears over a baby bird’s lifeless body.

 

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Joseph’s voice finally rises from the penumbra, faint, discreet, unsure.

When Sebastian looks in his direction, Joseph can see the diluted, pink hue in his sclerae. His voice, roughed and hushed from having broken in pain, finally answers:

“Yeah… could you make us tea? The box in the second shelf starting from the microwave. The cups are in the one on the left,” he guides Joseph as he walks to the kitchen. “There should be a third cup for you.”

Joseph’s hands find the shelf. Sebastian doesn’t see the way his eyes flicker with a pained, yet painfully hopefully light when the third cup is brought up.

“Which box is it?” he asks.  
“The blue one. ‘Nightmare Care’, or something like that. The one with passionflower.”

Joseph’s fingers dislodge the box from the shelf and, as he says a clear, but soft “found it” in Sebastian’s direction, he catches in his field of view the way Sebastian’s head hangs on the side, eyes weary, emptied of their light as exhaustion has washed over him, the way Lily rests against his chest, her arms hanging, limp and heavy, at her sides.  
His gaze meets Sebastian’s as he seems to jolt out of his mental fog.  
Joseph feels his heart tap against the back of his tongue.

 

       The steam swirls out of the cups in white, delicate dances that vanish in the purple penumbra. Sebastian’s voice croaks a “thank you” that Joseph acknowledges with a nod as the hot tea finds the cradles of Sebastian’s and Lily’s hands.  
Lily sniffles as she brings her face over the vapors of passionflower.  
Sebastian invites Joseph to his side with a glance at the free space on the couch.  
Joseph sits in silence, Lily’s chest rises in a whimper.  
A dark brown gaze observes Sebastian’s lips meeting the brim of the cup.

 

       Sebastian carries Lily’s heavy, exhausted body in his arms as he walks back to her room, inviting Joseph after him with a half-lidded gaze.

Sebastian tucks Lily under her blankets, arranging her plush toys like guardians around her pillows. As he slips between her tired, weak fingers her favorite horse cuddle toy, Sebastian positions himself on the bed, laying on his side as an elbow supports his weight — and invites, with a nonchalant hand, Joseph to do the same.

“I don’t wanna sleep,” Lily’s hushed, croaky voice rises from her fortress of soft toys, “I want mommy.”  
“I know, sweetheart,” Sebastian answers, and fatigue weights his words, makes his mouth numb as he struggles to articulate, “I know, but you should really sleep.”

He pulls Lily’s blanket a bit higher over her.

“It will help you settle all these emotions in your brain. You will subconsciously process them during your sleep and tomorrow you’ll have a new perspective.”

Joseph can see how Lily’s eyes, even though weary and red with sorrow, harbor an interested light at Sebastian’s thorough explanations, curiosity making her pupils grow wide.  
Sebastian brushes a hand in his tired daughter’s hair, trying to fetch from every corner of his brain all the scientific explanations he has read about sleep. Lily fears the dark, mindless wandering of her subconscious that appears behind her eyelids when she closes her eyes, nightmare bubbling to the surface, and Sebastian knows telling her to “ _just sleep_ ” will not get them anywhere.  
He tries to recall — but his brain has grown foggy, exhaustion making his thoughts slips past his grip, vanish and transform in ridiculous sentences.

“You need some sleep to be able to fully enjoy tomorrow,” Sebastian mumbles through the tiredness creeping up on him, his jaw growing numb. “Sleep, dear, and if tomorrow you still want to cry a lot, we’ll talk some more about it, okay?” he manages to finish through slurred and slipping words.

Lily doesn’t answer. She settles herself between the walls of plush animals, wiggling lower under her blanket.  
Joseph and Sebastian stay at her sides and watch over her as she drifts off to sleep, mute, profane sphinxes keeping vigil beside the child in her cradle.

“Hey,” Sebastian’s voice rises, barely a whisper, barely a breath in the silent room where Lily’s slow, even respiration keeps the time. “Thank you.”

Joseph’s raises an eyebrow, detaching his gaze from the sleeping Lily whose head barely pokes out of under the covers.

“For what?”  
“Putting up with us,” Sebastian answers with a shrug. “Making us tea. You really didn’t have to. I just needed to thank you."

Sebastian hears Joseph’s voice crack in a low, faint laugh that a quirk of his lips carries out.

“It should be the other way around,” Joseph shakes his head, and Sebastian sees the way his mouth doesn’t go back to resting in a thin straight line.

Joseph’s eyes carry a faint, delighted, delightful glimmer. In the dark room, under his dark lashes, his gaze drips of gold and Sebastian finds his heart knocking against his ribs.

“You’re the one who pulled me out of the hospital,” Joseph continues, “you’re letting me sleep in your house, in your bed.”

Joseph’s eyes climb to Sebastian’s and Sebastian’s lungs tighten at the way Joseph slowly, faintly, tiredly blinks. The smile toying with his lips is small, almost loose, as if fatigue made it hard to keep on, and Sebastian thinks that, were he to read them like a blind man reads braille, he’d find pure, unfiltered tenderness under his fingertips.  
The thought terrifies him.

“It’s the least I could do.”

Joseph’s smile fades off his lips like color off a dying flower when he hears and weights in the palm of his hand the subtext, the underlining of Sebastian’s own soul, six words the man feels carved into his skin but could never say:

_“... after abandoning you for three years.”_

Sebastian watches Joseph watching him, his gaze growing grey with sorrow.

“Just acknowledging me would have been enough,” Joseph finally whispers.  
“I’m glad to have you around,” Sebastian finally answers.

Sebastian thinks he can feel the way Joseph’s heart misses a beat as an almost imperceptible, choked noise escapes his lips.  
Joseph turns his head away.

“I owe you a lot,” Sebastian says, and Joseph turns back to him.  
“For three cups of tea?” he laughs, but Sebastian can hear how his voice croaks and cracks, the facade of amusement poorly hiding the way his heart gallops, erratic, between his lungs.

Joseph knows, and Sebastian knows he knows, that he’s also talking about anything and everything that happened to them before and during their formative hell — the times Joseph took out a man who would have unhesitantly stabbed Sebastian on the job, the times he kept him from doing some very, very stupid shit, the times he stayed with him until dawn as Sebastian lost his mind over disappearances, the time he reported him to the IA (which, whether or not Sebastian was happy about at the time, saved his ass — and there’s no one but Joseph to thank), the times in hell, in _this hell_ , where Joseph saved his life, over and over.  
_“I owe you a lot_ ” were Sebastian’s words, and under Joseph’s dark, almost undetectably moved eyes, he feels he should have said, _“I owe you my life”._

“... It’s the least I can do,” Joseph adds. Barely a sound, barely a whisper, lower than Lily’s soft snoring.

The night cradles the three of them and trembles with an imperceptible hiccup as he turns his head and bites into his cheek.  
Sebastian’s lips curl in a wide, weary but charmed smile.

 

       Sebastian walked Joseph back to his room, as if he had never been here. He stayed in the half-open door as Joseph leaned against the frame.

“Goodnight, Joe,” Sebastian whispered.  
“You too, Seb,” Joseph answered.

They shared a smile — drowsy, drained, but bright with a light, a warmth beating softly in their chests, almost shared.

When Joseph walked to the bed, Sebastian stayed in the half-open door.  
Joseph didn’t invite him. Joseph didn’t tell him off.  
Sebastian made a step in the room, and Joseph smiled.  
Sebastian made a second step in the room, and he smiled.  
Joseph who hadn't moved yet pulled him in, pulled him on. His weary tender gaze called Sebastian like a light calls a moth — Sebastian was a butterfly and Joseph had nectar on his wrists.

Joseph didn’t touch him, and Sebastian didn’t touch Joseph. They laid one on each side of the bed, whispered a “goodnight” in what started to look like dawn.

Joseph didn’t touch him, and Sebastian didn’t touch Joseph.  
Sebastian vaguely opened an eye after a few hours of sleep and realized Joseph was pressed against his back, his face between his shoulder blades. Unbothered, Sebastian patted his pillow.

 _Joseph didn’t touch him, and Sebastian didn’t touch Joseph_ , Sebastian lies to himself.  
He threw an arm around his side and set his hand on Joseph’s.  
The world didn’t end, and it felt right.  
Sebastian fell back asleep.

 

       The sun rises over exhausted bodies curled into blankets. Gold drips into the living room.  
A small, round bird sings.  
The drops of herbal tea at the bottoms of the mugs had gone cold and now fill the entire house with the smell of passionflower.  
Two small, round birds sing.

 

 


	11. Blessed Be the Coward who Died a Thousand Times

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which...

       Joseph’s tired gaze becomes an invitation, dawn after dawn, twilight after twilight. Sebastian watches him slip into the room and throw a glance over his shoulder. Heavily lashed, tinted honey, Joseph’s eyes call Sebastian in their wake without a word spilling in the evening atmosphere — Sebastian follows him, his steps light, charmed, guided; he shuts the door behind him.

Sharing his own bed with Joseph is more comfortable than he thought it’d be, the warmth of the other man’s body radiating over the sheets, permeating the light fabric under them.  
They make Sebastian’s mind run wild, these wordless, breathless moments — running to a time blurred and soaked in liquor, to Sebastian’s vision of himself dragging his own body into Joseph’s bed, Joseph who pretends he didn’t see him.  
Never talked about, never acknowledged, a secret that they lock in their chest as if it was something so shameful.  
_Is it? Is it?_  
Joseph acknowledges him now. He turns to Sebastian to wish him goodnight, nuzzling the pillow as he settles to sleep.  
Sebastian’s lips feel numb as he repeats Joseph’s words, his “ _goodnight_ ” sounding so dim, so faded — a photograph let too long in the sun.

 

       Sebastian feels them walking the tightrope over the deep dark chasm they do not dare to name, and he feels his own feet slipping off the thread. Joseph looks at him, then doesn’t, dawn washing their shared gaze as it rises upon them, sweep off their skin the shared looks, the hands that reach out, brushing off their smiles the words that Sebastian feels tickling his mind, ringing against his tongue — “ _intimacy_ ”, unspoken, unspeakable, devouring him from the inside.  
Sebastian looks at him, then doesn’t.  
He doesn’t want to hold, and then he does; Joseph wants to stay away, then can’t.  
They fall asleep one on each side of the bed, a valley between them, and Sebastian only feels himself smiling when he wakes up for nothing in the middle of the night only to see Joseph huddled up against him.  
Something gnaws at his lungs and breathing becomes difficult. He swears to himself, he will not join Joseph tonight.  
He still does, and that feels heavenly.  
Dawn comes.

 

       It’s almost four in the afternoon, and Lily is having a field trip. Sebastian found Joseph awake at four in the morning, and he had his own hands tightened around his throat, his chapped, parted lips echoing the words “ _they’re trying to take my head off_ ” until saliva dripped down his chin as he couldn’t breathe.  
Joseph’s fingers run and run again over the scar that fades quicker than the winter sun on his neck. Obsessive, disturbed, eyes wide, his nails scrape the skin around as if he tried to dig out something laying under.  
Sebastian reached a hand. Joseph considered it, eyes confused, and took it. Sebastian felt the electric shock in his fingers of bare palm meeting bare palm — Joseph’s gloves, his shield, his protection, his weapon discarded on the bedside table make Sebastian’s chest hurt at the thought of Joseph letting him feel his naked hand.

“I missed hearing you,” Joseph’s voice, hollow and flat, pierces the silence.

Sebastian’s eyes rise to his face. Blank, aloof, gaze fixated on the ceiling — Sebastian can hear his breathing quicken.

“Talk to me.”

And Sebastian obeys.

 

       It’s six in the afternoon and Lily combs her damp hair at the sink, perched on her stool with the grace of a lioness watching over her territory. Dinner is cooking in the big oven, the sound of vegetables browning in the sauce sparkling in the silent house.  
Joseph’s eyes have grown wide with Sebastian’s voice, low and delicate, to his ears. He is awake, curled on his side as he faces Sebastian who speaks, speaks. Joseph hums in acknowledgment and agreement, his voice shared between their two heartbeats. Sebastian doesn’t dare more than a whisper.

“I thought I was done with Beacon, that it would never come back to haunt me.”  
“Why would you think that?” Joseph asks, and through the veil of a muted sleep falling over him, Sebastian can hear sparks, like chips, of guilt, of anxiety, of pained interrogation.

Sebastian’s fingers trace a line in his palm, the stroke of a knife, of a blade, of something his brain has already blurred.

“... I killed my old self back in their new STEM.”  
“Killed…?” Joseph’s voice sweeps the silence, low, breathy, something like sorrow wringing it to a thread.  
“Blew its brains out with a shotgun.”

He glances to Joseph and sees how his face contorts in emotional pain, heartache carving a deep line between his eyebrows.

“Sebastian… You can’t fix everything with a bullet.”

Sebastian falls silent.

“You can’t kill the ghosts of your past,” Joseph insists, voice thin with pressure, “because _they’re already dead_.”  
“But I did!” Sebastian blurts out, whines out, explodes as his voice trembles. “I shot it! It’s supposed to be dead!”  
“You need to stop thinking with your gun and fists, Sebastian,” Joseph interrupts him, and even though his voice is firm, Sebastian falls wordless at the tenderness coating his words. “You need to stop to want to kill it away. It’s never going to work.”

Sebastian doesn’t dare a word. He watches the way Joseph watches him, furrowed brows, worried eyes, compassionate gaze.

“Sorry,” Joseph finally whispers. “This is too harsh.”  
“No, no,” Sebastian interrupts him, “you’re being painfully honest. Keep speaking. Keep talking. I need this.”

Joseph raises, slowly, a confused eyebrow.  
Sebastian doesn’t move, slowly closing his eyes. A low, soft sigh makes his chest heaves and, with a small nod in Joseph’s direction, incites him to continue.  
After a short, pondering silence, Joseph finally does.

“You can’t resolve trauma by trying to destroy it without, in the process, destroying yourself. You can’t just kill it and hope it never comes back from the grave.”

Joseph’s voice is low, muted, strangely gentle in a way Sebastian feels deeply unfamiliar yet incredibly comforting.  
He doesn’t quite remember anything like this but maybe, he thinks, this is the voice Joseph had when he helped Sebastian out of his drunken, sorrow-struck stupor and into the bathtub, this eternity ago — a voice lost in the cocoon of his silent, clean, comforting apartment where Sebastian would always come back to, like a drowned man washing ashore the same beach over and over, a voice safely secured in Sebastian’s chest, subconsciously recorded, registered, cherished.  
As Sebastian doesn’t add anything, Joseph carries on:

“... and when I say ‘it’, I mean ‘you’. You can’t kill _yourself_ and hope to never come back. Trauma is a part of you, whether you want it or not. It shaped you, it twisted, bent you, it left you sleepless and hurt. You can’t just shoot it away.” Joseph watches the way Sebastian’s closed eyes twitch and he grimaces at the words, as if having bitten into a lemon, the sourness stinging his throat. Joseph’s voice grows smaller, more intimate, almost, and he adds: “You cannot run, either. Not that you should.”

Sebastian’s lids rise like a heavy curtain over his eyes and a long, deep, noisy sigh rumbles in his chest.

“So what I am supposed to do?” he asks, even though he knows — oh, he knows, and the bare thought of it makes his throat tighten.  
“What you did with all the others,” Joseph answers simply. His voice is faint, almost muffled. Sebastian feels it, a warm breath, against his throat — he didn’t realize how close Joseph was. Not that he really mind it. “Confront yourself. Talk to yourself. Maybe your old self won’t give in as easily as other memories, but there is nothing else to do.”

Sebastian’s lips quirk in an ironic grimace and a bitter chuckle makes it past his lips, dark and deep where it is born between his lungs.

“Talking to myself, huh? Well, if I didn’t look crazy before…”  
“What’s crazier?” Joseph cuts him off, and the sudden strength, clarity and power in his voice makes Sebastian jolt out of his bitter haze, “Thinking you can kill your past and have it never come back or sit in front of it to understand it?”

Sebastian stays in silence, as if stunned, under Joseph’s piercing gaze. He barely dares to make eye contact, Joseph’s dark, powerful eyes making his skin burn. He opens his mouth to speak but Joseph promptly turns away, almost in shame.

“Sorry,” Joseph whispers, breathless. “I sound so harsh.”  
“You don’t,” Sebastian hastens to tell him, and his voice has dropped to Joseph’s level — small, hushed, barely a sound in the vast room, and Joseph’s eyes climb to his face again. “You’re right about everything.”

As Sebastian lets out a long, heavy sigh, Joseph’s dark eyes on him glimmer with faint, pained hope and sorrow that carve a line between his worried eyebrows.

“I think…” Sebastian begins — and his voice drops, croaking as it grows veiled with a pain like a fog between his lungs.

He needs a moment to recollect himself, clearing his throat. To the sound of his barely-audible voice, Joseph mindlessly curls up closer to him.

“I’m too scared to face my own self. And I tried to kill it — I mean, ‘me’... because I _knew_ that doing something else would hurt me more.”  
“Well,” Joseph replies, and his voice is barely a whisper, a murmur, warmth against Sebastian’s neck as they unconsciously huddle against the other — only for him to hear, to feel, to ever witness — “I think that, in that case, hurting is the only way you’ll make peace with your past.”

Sebastian’s chest heaves slowly, softly, in a long expiration sounding like relief.

“You’re absolutely right,” he murmurs.

Without thinking, he turns to Joseph. He finds the two umber marbles of his eyes, unthinking, unjudging, welcoming to the depth of his irises.

“... Again.” Sebastian finishes, and a sharp, clear laugh echoes out of his chest.

Out of this word and into Joseph’s ears seep years of Sebastian playfully elbowing him in the ribs as he walked into their shared office with inked reports, singing his “ _guess who was right about the suspect!_ ” song, to which Joseph would simply reply with a shrug and an almost self-righteous “ _told you so_ ”. Sebastian would playfully elbow him again, ever enough to do any harm, and half-heartedly scoff him.  
Relief and satisfaction would flow into the room like a breeze sweeping hours of sleeplessness, of agitation, of Joseph slipping energy bars in Sebastian’s back pocket.  
Joseph mindlessly curls up closer to him — Joseph would never, ever have admitted it, but… Sebastian praising him _did_ something to him. He used to pretend he didn’t notice, until he did, and it was the beginning of a whole weirder thing.  
_You’re right, again._  
Joseph’s eyes close in contentment, and a smile toys with the corners of his mouth. Sebastian laughs once more.

A silence washes over them, comfortable, warm wave over the fragile masks covering their mouths, their eyes that peek at the other and promptly look away.

“There are professionals you can talk to,” Joseph finally speaks, his voice still as low, just for Sebastian’s ears, “and I think they could really help you. I still understand if you didn’t want to go see them.”

Sebastian hears the way Joseph’s breathing runs in and out of his chest, the long sigh that slips out of his lips that tremble, unsteady, insecure, as if he was trying to get ready.  
_Ready for what?_  
Sebastian feels Joseph’s head against his shoulder.

“... And I’m here if you need me. Tell me if I can help you in any way.”

His voice is not sound, not words. It is a warm breath in Sebastian’s neck, more easily tasted on his lips than heard to his ears.  
Vulnerable, almost, in a way none of them would admit they ever were.  
Unsteady yet mighty. Faintly determined.

“I think you did more than enough,” Sebastian answers — low, small, tender enough for Joseph to swallow. Mellow in a way he never thinks he ever was. “I need to take the matter in my own hands.”

 

       Eventually, Joseph falls asleep. Sebastian cradles him in his arms, unbothered, unconscious, mindless in the ways of a dizzy man. It doesn’t feel wrong. Joseph’s breathing lulls him to sleep as he bases his own on it. Two sets of lungs for a single respiration, a single metronome in the tepid, tearless night. Sebastian’s hand instinctively runs up and down Joseph’s spine. The scars barely bother his fingertips in their path.  
Sebastian doesn’t dream.

 

       He’s already awake when the thought catches up to him — vivid as a nightmare, clear as a lucid dream.  
Clear, clear, clear like Myra’s eyes — he thinks of Myra’s eyes.  
Blue, green, grey, icy in their color, icy in their gaze — so cold.  
_So cold._  
Scornful, hurt, betrayed — _so cold._  
Sebastian jolts out of the sleepy haze he was stuck in.  
His breath hitches in his throat and a whistling noise escapes his lips as if something had been sitting on his chest.  
He staggers out of the bed, Joseph mumbles something through the veil of sleep.

In the bathroom where he had sought refuge, Sebastian tries to drown these thoughts in the cold water he splashes over his face. Bent over the basin, the faucet running, he feels the cold water drips onto his shirt, his pants, the floor — _oh, cold._  
He peeks at his reflection and the mirror shines its grey lights at him — grey lights like Myra’s eyes who, giant, in front of him, over him, above him, watch his every move.  
Myra’s eyes, so… disappointed.

 _“Oh god_ ,” Sebastian manages to arrange in his thoughts, words choked up in his brain as they would in his chest, _“I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have done that.”_

Guilt drowns his words, his thoughts, and as Joseph walks into the bathroom, the tee-shirt Seb lended him slipping off his shoulder, he feels like a sinner — sinner he once felt he was, he remember, sinner he, maybe, once was (the “maybe” burns under Myra’s raw, glacial eyes). His spine bends under the burden of pleaded forgiveness.

“Is everything okay…?” Joseph’s voice rises from being him.

Sebastian swallows back what tastes sour and tart, what he feels drips in his veins — guilt and something else, something that stirs it like wind fans a wildfire and makes it grow, grow, _grow_ …

“I’m fine,” he replies. “I’m fine.”

When Joseph leaves the room, unconvinced, Lily is standing in his way. Their eyes meet, and hers stare at him, crystal lakes into which he sees his bewildered face.  
As a mute, wide-eyed, knowing reaction to her father’s words, she shakes her head slowly.

“I know,” Joseph whispers.

Lily grabs his hand as they walk to the kitchen.

 

       Sebastian can’t stay near Joseph, and yet he can’t stay far, and he doesn’t notice it — or maybe, he refuses to. He tries to stay away, stay calm, stay cool, and he sits next to Joseph on the couch, he feels the way their knees touch. He pretends it doesn’t faze him.

If he doesn’t notice, he thinks, how he feels like every glance Joseph slips in his direction cracks his ribcage open and crawls within to nestle between his lungs, maybe he will avoid the grave, algific, biting eyes he imagines carved into his memory of Myra’s eyes.

He manages to escape it, and then he doesn’t, and when he leans into Joseph’s face to whisper something in his ears that Lily can’t hear just to tease her, he feels a shiver run up his spine like long, thin fingers. He promptly turns away.  
Out of his gaze, Joseph and Lily exchange a saddened, knowing look.

 

       It’s almost nine in the evening, almost Lily’s bedtime hour. Sebastian can’t look at his reflection in the mirror as he combs his wet hair.  
He can’t, either, hear Lily and Joseph’s conversation over her textbook, laying open on the kitchen table.

Joseph speaks, Sebastian hears his voice but not the words. He almost shivers at the tone that he doesn’t, yet does, recognize.  
Low and warm and secretive, an admission, a sigh of relief. Sebastian feels the memory of it on the tip of his tongue and wonders when it is from.

“I know,” Lily’s voice echoes from across the house. Soft, measured, reassuring. Sebastian could recognize it in the midst of Armageddon. “I think he does too…”

Silence follows in the midst of her voice. The scratching of her pen on paper comes tinkling at Sebastian’s ears. The hands of the clock looming over the occupied table run its pearly face to a peaceful ticking. Between two beats of this unstoppable tempo, Sebastian can guess the long, faint sigh escaping Joseph’s sigh.  
Sebastian puts the comb down and walks to the kitchen.

“It’s bedtime, tiger!” he calls Lily, the cheerfulness in his voice sounding hollow and fake as he forces his words out.

To the strain in her father’s voice, Lily shoots a knowing, almost grave look to Joseph. A short, imperceptible nod answers her.

Sebastian guides her to her bed. As he turns to Joseph before exiting the room, he catches his gaze on him.  
Mild, simple, neutrally, undetectably kind.  
Sebastian feels his heart turn upside-down between his lungs, and he is the one to look away.

 

       Three years spent being unable to reach him, and now he can’t seem to leave him, Sebastian thinks as he lays, spread out over the blankets, one arm supporting his head as the other rests at his side, allowing Joseph to come closer.

There is this mute acknowledgment, this unspoken truth behind these moments they share.  
A desperate, unholy cry born of three years of words they couldn’t let out, secrets crawling like bugs under their skin that they pretend they do not notice, but which disappear with each breath they hear themselves share.  
A choked, pained scream of the other’s absence. Three years are long years to spend in the pits of guilt and abandonment, of slipping in and out of reality only to think, when your consciousness finally rises to your eyes, that maybe you’ll never be remembered, of searching for a tombstone to bend to and cry that never rises from the ground.  
A string of words, suspended in time…

Sebastian remembers Juli’s admission that Joseph wasn’t dead, how a stunned silence fell into his lungs and choked the air out of him. All of the coffins and crosses and stones he had raised, in his mind, for Joseph vanished to the tune of her voice, and the persistent thought of Joseph’s body lying in a ditch crawled to a darker, smaller part of his mind to be left to rot — it still came to bug Sebastian at night after this, when Juli hadn’t called all day, and Sebastian’s tongue would grow numb with how hard be had to bite down not to scream.  
But Joseph is here.  
Joseph is here, and Sebastian has three years spent away from him to make up for.  
He wishes they could do what they used to — black coffee until dawn over scattered papers, high-fives bursting with joy and fatigue as exhausted, but pure fits of laughter filled the room, bacon and eggs at the closest diner, Joseph putting that weird seaweed on his toast and Sebastian losing his mind over it.  
He wishes they could bond like they used to — how did they bond? _The same as I did with Myra_ , Sebastian thinks. Colleagues saving each other’s lives.  
Myra’s eyes flash behind his eyelids as he blinks, but he shakes them away. Where does this sudden strength come from…?

Joseph lays, gazes, not quite tired yet. His neck is straining from the way his head is turned to Sebastian, but he doesn’t seem to mind.  
Sebastian looks at Joseph, and Joseph looks at him. The rising penumbra looks over them both.

 

       “I had totally forgotten I left my coat at Beacon,” Sebastian finally says, his voice barely enough to bend the heavy silence over them. He almost laughs, but doesn’t dare to disturb the quiescence any more.  
“You wouldn’t have found it,” Joseph answers, and his voice is low, deep, it echoes in both of their chests and Sebastian can almost taste it. “Myra took it when you were unconscious. She kept it for a while.”

Sebastian’s breathing stops. Not suddenly, not sharply — it simply hangs in the air at the mention of Myra’s name. Sebastian watches how Joseph’s eyes wander the fields of his memory, staring off into space.

“... Then she gave it to me,” Joseph adds, and Sebastian barely hears it — he reads it on his lips.

Sebastian falls silent, his words dissolving in the heavy veil of the night. They fall onto Joseph’s face, silent, thoughtful, his eyes seeking recollection within his chaotic memories. He doesn’t find it, and doesn’t insist — his eyes climb to Sebastian’s and find an anchor here, and as if Sebastian didn’t have shitty lungs already, Joseph’s peaceful gaze on him pulls all the air from his chest.  
Why does it hurt, why does it soothe?  
What is it, in Joseph’s umber irises, that is more powerful that alchemy? Deep and dark, pulling him in, drawing him on, magnetizing.  
Sebastian wants to believe the answer is “ _three years of thinking he’d never seem them again_ ”.

 

       The night weighs on them like a comforting, consoling blanket. Stillness and lull cradle them and to the sound of a distant, fading clock, they can feel the other’s breathing in the space separating them.  
_In, out,_ to the each to the rhythm of the other, how natural can this be?  
The dark circles under Joseph’s eyes bring up the chips of gold around the pits of his pupils.

Sebastian sees it unfold under his eyes, and yet doesn’t. A blind man resides behind his eyelids and a psychic in his chest — they count the second he spends waiting.  
Joseph leans in.  
He waits like a heathen awaits the apocalypse, like a worshipper awaits redemption — with unthinkable fear, with debilitating faith, with the intimate, almost resigned yet hopeful conviction that it is bound to happen.  
And it happens.  
Joseph curls up against him, using the arm slipped under his pillow to push himself up, and kisses him.

The tightrope burns under Sebastian's feet and yet he stays, stunned, mute, breathless funambulist, suspended in the air, suspended to the brim of Joseph’s lips.  
Joseph doesn’t insist, Joseph doesn’t demand, Joseph doesn’t ask for anything more than what he dared to take: a single, close-mouthed peck, lips resting, almost lazy, upon Sebastian’s.  
He is frugal, chaste, almost shyly so.  
His restraint, Sebastian can feel in the brush of his lips on his, is nothing but a facade, and want, longing, hunger rage in his chest like a storm.  
Self-containment as the illusion of discipline, Joseph harnessing his desire as he loses his breath in the debilitation fear of hurting Sebastian— “ _but why would it harm? how could it harm?_ ” Sebastian’s mind asks, barely shy. He doesn’t have the occasion to reassure Joseph — not that he could, rendered immobile, stunned, his bewildered eyes widened to the point of pain, his arms frozen at his sides — that his friend is already pulling away.  
He only realizes their lips fitted perfectly when Joseph’s have left.

Sebastian watches Joseph unable to watch him.  
He sees Joseph’s head turned to the side, Joseph’s jaw clenching as he bites his tongue. Joseph tries to hold his gaze, he really does, but his eyes avoid and run and escape.  
Sebastian stays still.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph blurts out, and he throws the blanket away from him as he jumps out of the bed.

He disappears into the hallway, and Sebastian stays still.

Joseph comes back, eventually. He takes all the blanket for him and curls on the far edge of the bed.  
Sebastian’s lips still sing with the effects of an alchemy he can’t seem to swallow.

 

 


	12. Whatever you take me for (I'm not running anymore)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sebastian needs to let go.

       The kiss haunts him.  
Almost more piercing than Myra's gaze when his thoughts wander to how Joseph curled up against him, almost drilling, digging into his mind — yet comfortable, lulling, tender in a way the glacial eyes are not. Soothing, yet fueling his fear of this stare.  
Sebastian tries to pretend he doesn't think about it.

And yet he does, god, he does.  
Joseph's eyes escape his, dissolving in shame when Sebastian tries to catch them. Joseph is running, and the way he closes his hands in fists into his leather gloves makes Sebastian's mind rings of memories — when did he use to do this? _Why would he have done this_?  
Sebastian's thoughts run wild as Joseph runs from him.

 

“I'm sorry about the other day,” Joseph eventually whispers over a cold dinner.

And Sebastian wants to say “ _it's fine, don't worry_ ” but his mouth has grown numb, as if still paralyzed by a long-gone kiss.  
He wants to say he doesn't think about it anymore, that Joseph can let it go in peace — but that would be a lie, wouldn't it? A fat lie that doesn't belong in this house.  
He thinks about it, and he thinks about it for hours on end.  
Hearing Sebastian say nothing, Joseph gets up and leaves in a hurry. A mumbled, muffled “ _sorry_ ” slips past his lips. Sebastian watches him run to the bathroom.

 

       It's dawn and Sebastian is thinking about it. He dreamed of Myra’s eyes, which is usual, he dreamed of Joseph kissing him again, which isn't.  
It devours him, devours his guts like an idea devours a writer's brain, rabid, cannibalistic. Sebastian stands up and starts pacing around.  
_What do Joseph's eyes say? What have Joseph's eyes said?_  
Timid and strong, composed and tearing at the seams. What do they say? Sebastian feels like he knows, his guts telling, screaming at him the obvious — _those are the eyes you once had, blind moron._

Sightless, directionless, Sebastian feels his chest cave under the pression of the warm waves crashing against his bones.  
His thoughts drown and all he can do is feel. He walks to the closest window and sticks his head outside. The golden light of the small morning cascades onto him.

“God, I'm fucked,” he manages to articulate, a choked, bitter laugh making it past his lips, “I'm so fucked.”

He thinks of the way Joseph avoids him, kissed him, curled against him during the night, an eternity ago let him climb into his bed with a profound, acknowledging silence.  
What was there? What is there?  
A ray of sun shines the same hue as the yellow in Joseph's dark irises and Sebastian falls on his knees, as if wounded to his chest.  
There is something.  
It hurts and it soothes. He only half-succeeds to swallow it down.

Sebastian thinks about it, about his kiss, about his gloved hands, about the heavy blanket that used to cover his bed.  
Sebastian thinks about himself in a ball in Joseph's bathtub, about Joseph at the bottom of his, about their shared reflection in the mirror over the sink, and he cannot think of a relationship based on sacrifice anymore.  
He cannot think of Joseph mothering him like he did for years, cannot think of Joseph ready to kill himself to make sure he could survive, cannot think of himself giving up what could keep him safe back in the hellhole to make sure Joseph could carry on — _in this church_ , his thoughts race and intoxicate him, _this emerald-lit church_ like a stone cradle over their scarred minds.

Sebastian almost cannot breathe as he recalls how much, he has to admit, this dynamic made their dance on the tightrope of their friendship, how much they put themselves in front of the bullet to save the other — but now he thinks, he _thinks_ , as if his mind had been reborn anew, finally able to see colors.  
He sees, he remembers the arabica coffee he gave Joseph for his first birthday they celebrated as partners, the acidic orange juice they ordered at the diner where they would unfailingly crash, how they would laugh about it. He remembers Joseph patting his back as dawn rose over their messy desks, an encouragement and a thank, he remembers patting Joseph's back, a bit too hard, a bit too enthusiastic, making Joseph chuckle as his breath escaped his throat with the force of Sebastian's hand.  
He thinks of Joseph and that's all the morning light revolves around.

Joseph as his partner.  
Joseph as his friend.  
Joseph as...  
It hurts to breathe.

 

       Myra's words ring his ears, _"I forgive you, but the most important thing is that you forgive yourself_ ", and he did, or he thinks he did, but he cannot think about it. From the forgiveness he was given, he feels, he has greedily asked for more, taken more, so much more, enough to hurt the one who gave it, and now he finds himself — what day even is it? It’s two in the morning, and his reflection mocks him.

Forgiveness silently begged out of the forgiver forgave _this_ but didn't forgive _that_ , and this “that” is realer than that “this”, realer than anything he's ever felt — so real, he thinks, he can, he _could_ feel it, under his palms, his fingertips, the brim of his lips if he ever leaned in, just _leaned_ _in_ , there, where Joseph would just—

But he cannot do that.  
Because no one is there to bestow the forgiveness upon him, and to simply take it would be having to ask for more, and, and—  
And Sebastian is _torn apart_ by want, for more, for more.  
At Joseph's lips, he thinks, he could find a release for the embers making his chest burn, making him feel sick — but he feels like a blind man, and he cannot see, for the life of him, if Joseph wants it, wants this. He has never been good at reading his closest ones — and, oh, how horrifyingly it rotted things.

 

       It’s almost four in the afternoon and Sebastian’s thoughts still hang at the brim of his lips, holding onto the fragile words growing like fungi on his tongue.  
He wonders, does Joseph wants this?  
He looks over the table, catches the sight of Joseph’s hands putting a hair clip in Lily’s hair as she flips through a magazine, cheeping about how she wants it cut short. Sebastian dares to look up, and he trips over the edge of Joseph’s lash line, falls into the devouring pits of his eyes — how tender, how warm can they be as they pull Sebastian in like sirens a sailer into the sea, how patient can these infinite abysses can be? The answer’s in the question: infinitely.

Sebastian’s lungs ignite in the breath he takes, the dry memories lingering in his mind cracking into embers as the solitary, faint spark in Joseph’s eyes touch his skin.  
A fire, a devouring, all-consuming, ravaging fire ignites his chest he feels bursting open, wide enough that Joseph could crawl inside — _another fire_ , he thinks, a life-changing blaze, _a life-saving disaster._

“I’ll be right back,” Sebastian blurts out as words, so many words, so heavy, _so raw, so pure, so delightfully painful in the relief they seek at the brim of his lips_ , and he runs out of the house without putting a jacket on, his trembling hand making the door slam behind him.

He finds shelter in the red almost-carcass of his car and, as he drives away, directionless, thoughtless, mindless, his hands guiding what his meandering brain cannot, he cannot even distinguish between the rattling noise of the steel and the noise of his erratic thoughts running in his mind. His vehicle feels falling apart over him like his own self is within.  
The afternoon sun hits the ring on his finger and it pulsates this golden light, this amber light he feels he knows so well — a siren’s call, a world turning upside-down ( _will he lose Joseph again in this reality tipping over? Is he awake, is he even awake?_ )  
The lighthouse over his skin guides him to the sea.

 

       His car makes a suffocating, choked noise as he brakes violently on a sand path, wheels sliding a few feet closer to the end of the cliff. The seatbelt slams against the door as he furiously takes it off and he stumbles out of the vehicle as if it was burning.  
_Burning, again._  
The cliff stands tall over the erratic sea, waves furiously crashing at its feet as if they tried to make it shake.  
The sun turns the sky red as it looms over bewildered, wide-eyed, breathless Sebastian. Burning, too.

The slow, muffled rage of the sea lulls Sebastian into a trance, the dying screams of the waves dissolving into the water rising tall above them like like a chant to his ears.  
_What am I doing to do now_ , he wonders, _what am I doing?_  
He seeks answers in the white foam, sees nothing but the same chaos agitating his exhausted mind.  
He falls to his knees, his legs giving up under the weight of his turmoil. He doesn't even fight it.

“Whoever’s out there, whoever’s in here, give me a sign,” his croaking, unsure voice mutters somewhere deep in be his chest, “give me a fucking sign…”

No sign comes. The sun still burns, the waves still beat the rock, his heart still aches with how close it is to its truth. A long, long, _long_ sigh spills out of Sebastian's mouth and drips down his chest. Joseph's umber eyes surround him, encircle him, cradle him as he kneels on the dry dirt.  
_Where's this lighthouse now?_

 

       His thoughts have calmed as much as the sea did — they didn't. Sebastian is sitting behind the wheel, the back of his skull pressed against the headrest as if he wanted to melt into it. He sighs, sighs, sighs.  
The ring on his finger feels burning over his skin.  
His truth seeps into his lungs, stains his bones, hangs at the brim of his lips. It begs to be released and Sebastian bites, bites it down until it squeaks. Keep it in, terrified it'll spill, keep it in, no more losing oneself onto the dirty ground, no more blood to wilt the flowers.  
A singular, small, white petal flows into the car and lands on his cheek.  
He turns to the window, on the passenger side, through which it waltzed in, and he sees her.  
Myra is there. She is watching.

Sebastian's lungs grow cold and, as he opens his mouth to speak, only a pained, choked and shocked hiccup escapes his lips.  
Myra watches him, and he searches, frantically, for the glacial anger in her blue eyes he had imagined for days — he cannot find it.  
Myra's eyes calm, composed, deeply present as they stare into Sebastian's. Her mouth is curled in a light, dream-like smile. Sebastian doesn't dare to reach for her, but if he did, he doubts he would find the warmth of flesh.

“Myra.” He calls her once. His voice trips in his throat and comes out rough, painfully husky.  
“Sebastian,” she replies, and in her voice he hears this gracious, open tenderness that takes him by surprise.

He blinks once, twice. Myra doesn't disappear.

“How are you here?” He asks.  
“A first hypothesis is LCC,” she begins, her voice mild, tempered, kind, “or Lingering Consciousness Contact. One of the doctors working for Mobius in their early days coined this term to describe the residual energies of others’ consciousnesses into one person's for a certain amount of time after their extraction from the STEM system. The closer two people were before or in STEM, the easier it is for one person to reach another in what we could describe as a ‘telepathic’ manner. It isn’t really dangerous, if a bit confusing.”

Sebastian stays silent, his mouth slightly open in shock.

“... The second hypothesis would be that you are hallucinating,” Myra adds, and her voice melts into a soft, low laugh that has Sebastian nervously imitate her.  
“Yeah,” he replies, “I don't know which one would be worse.”

Myra's smile doesn't fade. Her hair seems almost transparent in the goldening light.

“... _Why_ are you here?” Sebastian finally asks, his hands instinctively reaching towards Myra, before promptly pulling away as if she had burned him.

Myra's face grows somber, her smile turning into a sorrowful line. Sebastian hears the small, pained sigh her chest heaves with. He turns to her fully.

“I saw you were torturing yourself over me again,” she finally says, her words poised and strong in her almost ghostly voice, “and I said I didn't want you to anymore.”

Sebastian huffs, an almost offended grunt making it past his throat. He immediately regrets it and he anxiously glances to Myra. She doesn't even seem fazed.

“... and the way you torture yourself over Joseph... it's less over _him_ , and more over the reaction you expect me to have, isn't it?”

Sebastian doesn't reply. He feels questioned under Myra's eyes, no matter how kind they are, how blue they shine upon him. He thoughtless plays with the ring on his finger.

“Sebastian, when I told you to live the life that was taken from you, what do you think I meant?”

Sebastian doesn't answer. He remembers these words, and doesn't, he remembers the face she had when she told them, yet she had no visage.

“I want you to be happy,” Myra carries on, and the delicate insistence in her voice makes Sebastian finally dares to look at her. “The way you torture over this… Sebastian, you're hurting yourself over a happiness that you _crave_.”

Blue, ice eyes soothe the burning embers in Sebastian's chest.

“... And if your road to happiness means accepting you are in love with Joseph and letting yourself start a new life with him, Sebastian, you have my _blessings_.”

Sebastian’s heart jumps in his throat, acrobat having lost its mind, spinning and flitting hanging onto his epiglottis — he shakes his head as if trying to push his own brain out of his skull.

“I don’t know if I’m… _in love_ with Joseph,” he says, and the words taste tart, foreign, numbing on his tongue.

Love, love love.  
What is left of the lover he once was?  
Are there any open arms, any open heart, any more room in his ribcage to carry a new love in the midst, the mess of his open chest?  
He starts to wonder if he can still feel, and the answer punches him right in the guts as Myra’s laugh cracks in a delighted, fond laugh.

“If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

It dawns upon Sebastian like the sun has for so many mornings.  
It dawns upon his craned head as he stares at his hands, it traps his breathless, exhausted, drowning body in a riptide as he opens his mouth to speak.  
It dawns upon him and he is washed ashore with the careful hands of his own senses, coming awake on the old, flaky seats of his red car.  
He glances at Myra, finding in her gaze the same patient, unaltered benevolence she bore when he dreamed of her in STEM.

“I don’t know,” he finally manages to speak, and his voice is lower than the song of the waves so far down, trembling on its thread as it bends under its feet, “I don’t know how that happened.”

Sebastian seeks, in Myra’s eyes, _something_ — reassurance, comfort, _love_?  
Her blue eyes on him are composed, calm, almost reserved in the way they let Sebastian speak, and she encourages him to continue with a nod.  
He does, and his low, rough voice seems to fray into what rings, in the warm passenger compartment of the old car, like a panic, a pain, an admission that makes his lungs burn with guilt — and yet, oh, how much _relief_ Myra can hear in Sebastian’s voice as he speaks slowly. His fingers awkwardly play with his knuckles as he tries to find his words.

“I can’t seem to see, to pinpoint when was I that I fell in love with him. It’s driving me insane.”  
“Maybe you fell in love with him,” Myra begins, her voice liquid with the sweetness of honey as a faint playfulness slips between her words, “when you shared a desk at KCPD and bonded over coffee. Maybe you fell in love with him when he allowed you to climb into his bed at three in the morning.”  
“You know about this?” Sebastian interrupts her, and the panic in his voice has Myra heartily waving it away as a smile shines on her face.  
“You know, Joseph and I spoke a lot when we had nothing else to do,” she promptly answers to Sebastian’s devouring curiosity, and swiftly carries on. “Maybe you fell in love with him the first time your minds were linked together in hell and you were each other’s survival. Maybe you fell in love with him when you sacrificed what you save your life when you saved his, back in this church.”

Sebastian grunts, less at the collection of the memory and more at the thought of Myra ever peeking into this moment only he and Joseph shared.  
He feels almost… _jealous_?

“Maybe you fell in love in his absence, only realizing how dear he was to you when you thought you had lost him. Maybe you fell in love when you saw his face on this picture again. Maybe.”

Sebastian catches, out of the corner of his eye, the way Myra promptly pushes a wild lock back behind her ear.

“But does it matter?” her clear, silvery voice calls in the silence of the golden afternoon. “Does it matter now?”

Sebastian’s eyes fall from her voice and onto the wheel. He sees marks his hands, sweaty and tense over the curve, have left into the material, and he thinks.  
_Does it matter now?_

“... I can’t pinpoint what made me fall in love in the first place.”

Myra’s lips curl in a tiny, knowing smile. Sebastian’s chest tears open, inch by inch, and he spills onto the driver's seat. She witnesses him, proud, honored, sublime.

“What made you fall in love with _me_?” she asks, and watches the way Sebastian’s eyes promptly slip to her face.

Myra sees the way Sebastian thinks in how his gaze looks away, searching in his mind, connecting the dots.  
Eventually, his eyes widen, his mouth falls ever-so-slightly open.  
A small yet heartfelt laugh escapes Myra’s lips.

“Oh god…” Sebastian grunts as he shakes his head.  
“You have a type, Sebastian,” Myra’s voice cordially sings, and she doesn’t fight the chuckle that tickles her tongue.

Sebastian’s voice cracks in a laugh, too, like life cracks through the shell of an egg, like the sun pierces through heavy dark clouds.  
Myra closes her eyes and lets his voice wash over her.

“Joseph is a very clever man,” she begins, her voice soft and low, delicate as a storyteller’s, “you admired him for it as much as he admired you… and the first time he got shot in front of your eyes, something in your chest started to hurt, right?”

Sebastian looks at her and through her looks at Joseph’s wounded side, looks at the blood rendering his hands damp as he tried to apply the hemostatic patch.  
He looks at himself looking at Joseph curled on his side in pain, a bullet lodged under his flesh, and, after a blink of his eye, looks at himself looking at — _he has written about it, he remembers,_ somewhere in his notebook. Written about Myra _curling on her side in pain, a bullet lodged under her flesh_ , and how, in the infinitely short, infinitely long moment Sebastian watched her writhe in pain, how he thought he should—  
_Oh_ , Sebastian thinks. _Oh_.

 

       Sebastian’s eyes turn dark, turn angry. As if someone, something — a single, sharply crafted thought slashing into his reflection — had flipped a switch inside of him. Myra watches this bad blood of self-hatred and unavowed fear make Sebastian’s jaw clench.

“I feel like I’m losing my mind again,” he starts spitting out, voice harsh as it scrapes his own bones. “For all I know you could be a fragment of my imagination, a chimera I made up to try to justify cheating on you. For all I know, you — Myra, the real Myra — could hate even _thinking_ of me loving Joseph. For all I know, I could be making up this scene in my sleep so I wouldn’t feel guilty anymore.  
“Is it working?” Myra’s voice tings in the air.

She’s playful, gently mocking. Sebastian turns to her in a sharp glance.

“Sebastian, what I need you to understand is that it _doesn’t matter_ if I am just a fragment of your imagination that you’re using and constructing to try to ‘justify’ your ‘cheating’. My words are my words, Sebastian, no matter how they reach you.”

Sebastian watches her. His jaw unclenches, millimeter by millimeter.

“And the words I say now, whether as my own self or as a mere projection of the memory you have of me, are the words I know you need.”

Sebastian’s eyes detach themselves from the deep blue sea under Myra’s eyelids and they turn to nothing.

“I mean every single word I have said in this car, on this afternoon. You can fight them or try to think of them as your own, as what your subconscious has made up to help you relieve the guilt — Sebastian, if they _do_ relieve it, believe them.”

Sebastian’s fingers find the ring ornamenting his hand. Myra watches the golden sun kiss his golden eyes.

 

       “I cannot,” Sebastian’s voice finally rises, the setting sun having washed its Tuscan, peaceful silence over the roof of the car. “I cannot cheat on you like that.”

Myra’s voice dissolves into a clear, mighty, fond laugh.

“Sebastian, this is not cheating. I am no more. I am from your past. I am merely a memory.”

Sebastian doesn’t respond.  
Myra’s eyes cast a gentle, compassionate gaze upon him, an ever so, so small hint of pain tinting the deep sea of her irises.

“I have voluntarily removed myself from your, and Lily’s lives so you could carry on. The day you see me again, Sebastian, is the day my body is laid into a casket.”

She hears the way Sebastian’s breath hitches in his chest, the imperceptible sound his throat makes as it tightens.

“Yeah, and _that_ is my fault too,” Sebastian’s voice trembles at the brim of his lips. “I didn’t believe you when you were right. I should have listened to you and none of this would have happened.”

Myra’s gaze grows full of sorrow, a deep grey veiling the blue mist of her eyes, at the way Sebastian’s anger at himself boils under his skin.

“You should have,” she begins, her voice barely a whispers between the windows, “but you didn’t, and there is no way to change this, just like there was no way to stop Mobius from taking Lily all these years ago. You’ll have your whole life to feel guilty everyday once I am gone for good…”

Sebastian catches, out of the corner of his eyes, the way Myra leans in to him.

“... Which is why I ask you not to. If you don’t want to forgive yourself for what you consider your crime… Well, I can’t make you.”

Sebastian sees how her hand brushes his — her touch cold, ethereal as he feels it going through him like mist.

“I absolve you. Even if you think I shouldn’t, I do.”

Sebastian tries to reach for her hand, and his palms catch nothing but air. Myra puts her hands on her lap, sitting tall, upright, dignified.

“We’ve already talked about this, Sebastian, haven’t we?”

Silence falls upon them.  
Sebastian observes how the fainting light brushes the gold of his ring.

“... I’m making you repeat because I wish you would stay.”

 

       The sun had been setting for hours, hanging onto the veil of the darkening sky as if it feared disappearing into the sea.  
Myra takes a glance at the red clouds growing from the other side of the earth, rising at the horizon.

“You need to move on from the time we had, Sebastian. This is where I need to disappear.”

A whine spills past Sebastian’s lips.

“The years we spent together were the happiest of my life and I know you’ll never forget me… Even if I wish you did.”

She turns to him as if she wished to hold him, but her hands stay prosaically on her lap.

“You’re tearing yourself apart between Joseph and me. You try to lock all the feelings you have for him in a deep dark place and throw the key because you’re trying to make yourself choose between staying faithful to me and letting yourself love him.”

A grimace makes Sebastian’s lips twitch.

“Sebastian, _there is no choice_. I am no more, and there is no more faithfulness you need to keep towards me. Choosing me is choosing to lock yourself in the past and rot with it.”

The sun starts to dive.

“Sebastian, Sebastian,” Myra’s voice grows more and more hurried, “you have my blessings to start a new life with him. Please go, please live, choose the light that burns within you when you see him smile, I know it shines. I’ve lived my happy life to your side, and I have chosen my happy death. I’m getting my happy end. It’s time for you to step onto the path that will get you yours.”

Myra’s fingers curl into her palm as she observes the lights dancing on her jewelry.

“Get rid of your ring,” she says. “I’m keeping mine.”

 

       The sky has turned purple. Myra turns to the horizon before coming back to Sebastian’s face.

“I’ve spoken longer with you today than I have with Joseph in three years,” Sebastian whispers as the fainting light burns his face.  
“That’s because you will never be able to talk to me anymore, dear,” Myra replies with the softest of smiles. “You will have your life to talk with Joseph, and I know he awaits it with more impatience than he would ever admit.”

Myra opens her mouth to speak, but Sebastian cuts her short — his voice bubbling with a violent avidity but his voice low, so low, a whisper that he feels goes through Myra like fog.

“Do you know how long Joseph has loved me for?” he asks. His words tremble with a hope that he feels burning in his chest.

Myra looks at him and her lips curl in a smile.  
A delighted, kind, caring, compassionate, knowing — so, so much on her mouth, like so many colors in the twilight clouds — smile.

“Yes.”

Sebastian waits for her to continue, but she doesn’t.  
Instead, Myra curls her hand in a fist and holds it to her chest as if she was bringing air to her exhausted lungs.

“I’m going to vanish soon,” she says. Her voice is small, sounds almost scared but isn’t.

It is not resignation in her words, but a long-awaited, heavy, blessing relief.  
Her piercing gaze finds Sebastian’s eyes and he feels all the air leave his lungs.

“Go live.” An order in the most delicate, gentle of voices. “Go, leave. Joseph is waiting for you. Lily is waiting for you.”

Myra takes the fist she had brought to her chest and offers it to Sebastian, knuckles forward — an invitation to fist-bump, a friendly greeting they used to do when they were just detectives on a case, when they weren’t lovers.  
A “ _let’s be just friends again”_ offered to the setting sun.  
A rebirth for a death, a new beginning, ouroboros finding the end of its tail.  
Sebastian closes his in a fist.

“Good luck,” Myra smiles, “and good life, Castellanos. I hope to never see you again.”

She smiles at her own words, and Sebastian’s lips curl up at their turn.  
Their knuckles meet. Sebastian feels Myra’s cold ring kiss his finger in a last goodbye.

“Goodbye, Hanson. Thank you for everything.”  
“Goodbye, Castellanos. Say hello to Joseph’s for me.”

Her smile, in the second unfolding in front of Sebastian’s eyes, grows wide, wide, wide, and her laughter rings like a delicate, crystal bell to his ears. It fills Sebastian's car, rises from the flowers on the ground, descends from the clouds. Their gazes meet, she closes her eyes.  
Just like that, she vanishes.

 

 


	13. I will learn to Survive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which, in which.

       Sebastian falls mute. His hand is still suspended in the air, the icy kiss of Myra’s ring still fresh on his flesh. His mouth falls open, his eyes grow wide. Myra’s absence dawns upon him in the red sun and his voice spills in a choked, shocked, thin whine that has him crawl out of the car and stand on the ledge.

His throat hurts, his chest hurts, his head hurts and yet, in the devouring, all-consuming, blazing red sun, the sea of freedom crashes against him in an overpowering wave.

Myra’s smile paints itself behind his eyelids as he stumbles and falls on his knees on the ground, eyes closed under the burning light. Another whine scrapes his throat, and as the memory of her memory vanishes, he finds himself whispering, the flowers growing around him making more noise than his voice, a “ _thank you_ ”.

“Thank you,” he repeats louder, “thank you, _thank you_.”

No one answers him. The sun watches him watch it, silent witness, sympathetic god to his misery and liberty. A sob bursts through Sebastian’s chest and he coughs it out, a single tear falling onto a flower as he feels himself smiling.

He is in a special kind of heaven, special kind of hell.  
He is falling apart and rising again. He is a weird kind of Phoenix with a ring on its talon.

 _The ring_ , he thinks, _the ring!_  
It burns into his flesh with the memory of Myra sliding it into place, it cripples his fingers so they don’t even think about removing it.  
When Sebastian reaches, unsure, to attempt to take it off, it slides off and to the ground as if he had never worn it.

“Shit!” Sebastian barks, and he crouches as he begins to search frantically for it.

 _Where is it? Where is it?_  
On the fertile dark soil and between the numerous flowers, the ring seems to have just disappeared. Grass and wildflowers surround Sebastian’s feet and as he dives a hand to try to find it, he discovered nothing but rocks and insects.  
_Where is it? Where is it?!_  
The earth swallowed it. The little white flowers, growing all around, have engulfed it.

_“Get rid of your ring, I’m keeping mine.”_

Sebastian looks at his finger. He sees the circle of pale skin onto which rested the ring. He sees his hand, bare, naked.  
He thinks of the gloves Joseph wears.

 

       Sebastian slams the car door as he sits behind the wheel.

_“Joseph is waiting for you.”_

Sebastian slams the gas pedal and swiftly, recklessly guides the car on the sand path by which he came, the sun disappearing behind him.  
A singular, white petal rests upon the dashboard, and as he drives off, windows down, it flies through opening, fleeting, light, ephemeral.  
Never to be seen again.

 

       Sebastian parks the car in the driveway and stumbles out as he struggles to get rid of his seatbelt in a hurry. He runs to the front door and stops in his tracks in front of it.  
He takes a deep breath. Another one. He rearranges his wild locks, mindlessly touches his newly-undressed finger.

_“Do you know how long Joseph has loved me for?”_

He pushes the door open.  
Joseph sitting at the dining table with Lily, overlooking her writing in her notebook, looks up as Sebastian closes the door behind him.

“I’m home,” Sebastian awkwardly announces, making a few unsure steps into the room.  
“Welcome back.”

Sebastian sees, in Joseph’s eyes as he watches him, that he knows something is different.  
Joseph’s curious gaze on him is unveiled, clear, genuine with an undemanding interrogation.  
An unworded _“is everything okay?_ ” habits Joseph’s visage as he watches Sebastian walk to the kitchen. Sebastian answers his silence with a nod and invites him with a movement of the hand.

“I’ll be right back,” Sebastian hears Joseph tell Lily before getting up.

Sebastian leans against the kitchen counter and his thoughts start racing at the same rhythm of his heart.  
What now? What now?  
He knows what he wants to do. He knows what he _needs_ to do. But still...

“Is everything okay?” Joseph’s voice pulls him out of his reflection as he walks up behind him.

Sebastian finds his gaze. They lock eyes and he sees how Joseph’s subtly jolts back, almost as if he was scared.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sebastian answers him. “I, um. I spoke with Myra.”

Joseph’s eyes grow wide, then small as he squints, visibly not understanding. Sebastian sees his unsure gaze fluttering from one side of the room to the other as he tries to comprehend.

“I mean, I may have hallucinated the whole thing,” Sebastian promptly tells him, an almost-laugh making it past his lips, “it could very be a ‘she came to me in a dream’ situation…”

Under the unresolved confusion of Joseph’s raised eyebrow, Sebastian’s continues:

“... But we had a long and coherent discussion, so… Maybe it wasn’t.”

Joseph doesn’t look any less confused but he still gives Sebastian some space to speak. He leans against a second counter and begins:

“What did you two talk about?”  
“A lot,” Sebastian chuckles, swallowing promptly a bitterness and sorrow creeping in his throat, “maybe too much and to say too little? I don’t remember what time I left the house.”

Joseph offers a slow, almost professional nod.

“Do you remember anything about what she said?”

Sebastian does. Sebastian does and his mind is filled with thoughts, with wants he could fulfill without fear — the deep cupid brow over Joseph’s lips calls him, a want he can feel on his tongue.

“Yeah.”

He takes a step towards Joseph.  
He observes how Joseph’s eyebrows slightly rise, a spark of confusion blinking in the brown of his eyes, but doesn’t step back.  
He takes a second step. Joseph looks at him. Sebastian sees what Joseph’s sees in his widening eyes, darkening with his how his pupil grows, and grows…  
He takes a third step and Joseph takes one.  
Sebastian makes a cup of his hands and reaches for Joseph’s face, and Joseph’s face reaches for the cup of his hands.  
They meet right there in what could be just enough, just right — he sees it in the way Joseph’s eyes close in bliss as he holds his face between his hands, he feels it in the way the warmth of Joseph’s skin against his makes his heart pound loudly with joy — but he dives in the space Joseph offers him and finds Joseph’s lips under his.

Sebastian feels the shaky, sharp inhale Joseph takes at the brim of his mouth and he relishes in the way Joseph leans in, takes a few tiny steps, almost climbing on his shoes. Joseph grabs his arm for support and Sebastian wraps the other around his waist.

The liplock making them lean into the other’s embrace is chaste, almost shy.  
Joseph doesn’t take more, doesn’t ask for more, but welcomes what he is given with a hunger Sebastian can feel in his own chest.

Joseph has to pull away, barely enough for their lips to not touch as he struggles to catch his breath. Sebastian contains a chuckle at this sight — Joseph kissing like he never ever did, Sebastian barely admitting to himself how flattered it makes him feel.  
He leans in for another kiss, careful to not rush Joseph in case he still hasn’t recovered, and Joseph welcomes him promptly.

Sebastian is keeping it gentle, offering a close-mouthed, barely insisting kiss to Joseph arching his back in his embrace.  
They part, the delightfully subtly wet sound of Joseph’s lips leaving his making something tingle down his spine.  
Joseph has to use the counter behind him to hold himself up as his legs almost give out under him. Sebastian tries his best to help him on his feet and locks both arms around his waist. Joseph clings onto him for support.

In his arms, Joseph grows immobile, as if stunned. Sebastian can feel him almost shake under his hands, as if he was wrecked by how much he wanted and overwhelmed by how much he was given. As if it was not enough, and too much.  
Sebastian runs a hand in his hair.

“How long have you been wanting this?” he asks, voice almost shy, mouth pressed to Joseph’s jaw.  
“Do you want to count the first two weeks we knew each other where I thought you were hot before I started wishing you’d kiss me?”  
“Oh god,” Sebastian grunts, and Joseph's voice breaks into a chuckle.

Joseph leans away and Sebastian thinks he’s going to push him, but instead he finds his head secured between gloved hands and Joseph’s lips are on his again.  
_Oh_ , he’s hungry, he’s almost desperate.  
Sebastian feels the way Joseph has to restrain himself as he nibbles at his mouth, promptly forcing himself into close-mouthed pecks again. Sebastian laughs and Joseph welcomes his voice with an open mouth — they promptly disengage themselves from the other’s kiss as they feel it escalate.

“Joseeeph,” Lily’s birdy voice call him from behind the wall Sebastian had carefully used as cover from her little eyes, “can you come help me with my maths problem?”

Joseph’s raises his head — and Sebastian takes the opportunity to kiss down his jaw, his throat, his neck — to reply clearly:

“Just a moment, Lily, I’ll be right back!”

With a half-hearted, playful scolding, he pushes Sebastian’s face out of the crook of his neck, holding him at a safe distance with his fingers on his mouth.  
Sebastian’s lips curl in a wide, blissful smile under his fingertips and he purses them in a kiss.

“Hey,” Joseph lightheartedly reprimands him, “hey!”

Sebastian looks at him, his half-lidded eyes shining with a delighted, liberated light.  
Joseph looks at him, his fingers twitching with the way they can map the curves of Sebastian’s mouth.  
A silence grows between their smiles. Joseph breaks it first.

“I love you,” he whispers.

Sebastian’s eyes grow wide.  
His breath leaves his lips in a stunned exhale Joseph can feel under his fingertips.  
He blinks once, as if waking up from a dream.  
_It’s real. It’s real._  
His throat tightens, his heart stops.  
Joseph’s hand moves from his mouth to his cheek and a long sigh escapes him.  
Relief, gratitude, and this heavy weight of fear fall off his shoulders. He closes his eyes and smiles again.

“I love you too.”

He opens his eyes, finds Joseph’s closed. He’s sure the blissful smile Joseph has was his, too.

“...Did you even need these words said?” Sebastian ask.  
“You know I didn’t,” Joseph replies after a small chuckle.

His thumb rubs the stubbly plain of Sebastian’s cheek an, from under his heavy lashes, Sebastian sees this pure, real and simple glee painting his smile wider.

“... But I would be lying if I said I didn’t _want_ to.”

Joseph looks at him. He looks pleased in this conscious and unconscious way, light and beatific, almost saintly.

“I love you,” Sebastian repeats, and Joseph almost looks surprised to hear it again. “I love you. _I love you._ ”

Joseph falls into his arms, leans of all his weight against him, arms thrown around his neck.  
Sebastian chuckles.  
Lily calls them both.  
When they slip out of each other’s embrace, Joseph takes Sebastian’s hands in his and kisses them.  
Sebastian feels Joseph’s lips brush against each of his knuckles.  
The paler skin upon which, what seems like an eternity ago, rested a ring, welcomes his kiss like a drowning man welcomes air.

 

       They shared the bed again.  
Joseph was awake at midnight, choking on pieces of a nightmare. Sebastian held him, held him close.

“I dreamed that everything since Beacon was a dream and you had died back in 2014.”  
“I didn’t,” Sebastian whispered against his forehead as he pressed here a kiss. “I didn’t, and neither did you.”

Sebastian was awake at two in the morning, choking on pieces of a nightmare. Joseph found his face in the dark and kissed him once, twice, Sebastian clung onto him, three times, four times.  
Sebastian opened his mouth to describe his dream but only a sob came out.

“I know, Joseph said. I know. I’m here. I’m right here.”

 

       The sun is rising. A clear, almost white gold kisses one horizon as the night dives into the other. Sebastian walks onto the deck, a cup of coffee in hand. The dew makes the wood damp under his feet as he steps to edge. He sits.

Joseph’s footsteps follow him. Sebastian looks over his shoulder and his mouth grows in an enchanted smile as Joseph waves at him. He sits a bit further on the side so Joseph can sit next to him.

“How are you feeling?” Joseph asks, and the smallest, most transparent thread of steam swirls out of his mouth in the morning freshness.

Sebastian puts his cup at his side.

“Free,” he first answers.

What he cannot find the strength to say is what he found freedom from — freedom from Beacon, that still haunts him but that cannot reach him, freedom from Mobius, sunken like a wooden ship eaten by moths and mice, devoured from the inside, freedom from the debilitating guilt over his head as he visited Lily’s grave. He doesn’t feel quite free from guilt altogether, and he tells himself it’s very probable he never will.  
Joseph knows it. He puts his head against Sebastian’s shoulder.

“You know what they say,” Sebastian’s voice rises in the little morning. “ _No more_ _bullets_ , an _d the embers are dead_ ’.”

He smiles and sighs.  
Joseph looks at him from where he is, perplexity following Sebastian’s words.  
_They’re from a song, aren’t they?_  
A sad, pained song crying over a destructive war, and yet Sebastian’s voice was calm and quiet like an untouched lake, peaceful under the sun. Curling this sentence around the growing tree of his own life like ivy growing on the trunk, making it a kinder world by taking this violence back.

No more bullets to fear, no more violence.  
The embers are dead, the ashes have grown cold, and of this reborn soil, the wildflowers will grow.

Sebastian turns to the door as he hears Lily trot onto the deck. She’s holding their black cat, who has grown huge and fat in her tiny arms; she carries him mightily still.  
Imitating Joseph, she leans against her father’s side.

The sun washes over them, climbing into the silky fabric of the morning sky, pulling in its wake a liquid gold dripping onto the deck.

There are four words suspended in the air, at the brim of their lips, whispered by the first lights. Looking at each other, Sebastian and Joseph share them in silence.

_“I have come home.”_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you've made it until the end.  
> thank you so much for staying until then, i hope you enjoyed your reading.
> 
> writing this fic was obvious and almost vital for me, with how kermit_screaming.png i was towards tew2 end. i was satisfied, yet i absolutely wasn't.  
> i'm just glad i could finish writing this before they announce any more bullshet. @ j*hn j*hanas hire me i will fix this shit for you.
> 
>  
> 
> anyways. this is where it ends.  
> i have written every big canon-(more or less)compliant Seb/Joseph fics i wanted to.  
> from now on, the ideas i have are drabbles, maybe shorter, that i will maybe at some point put in an ongoing, sparingly-updated fic.  
> i also have AUs i want to write for (those who have their eyes on my at blog know what i'm talking about, unfortunately for them i am that much of a insane person), and i also have a looong f/f i want to write, which will probably end up being similar in structure to Changing Tides.
> 
> but for now... i will focus on school a bit. i also bought the sims 4 and i may or may not go insane over it.
> 
> see you all in 6 months!  
> thank you for joining me today!


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